Landslides, Shocks, and New Global Rules: The US and Western Europe in the New International History of the 1970s

Michele Di Donato (1)

1 CHSP - Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po (Sciences Po)

Research on the international history of the 1970s has been flourishing in the last two decades. Through a search on Google Books N-Gram Viewer (an obviously imperfect, yet illustrative instrument) one can virtually single out the moment, in the early 2000s, when a new narrative of the late twentieth century took hold, so much so that writing (and reading) the words ‘since the 1970s’ became more common than writing (and reading) ‘since the 1960s’ (the relatively recent 1980s still lag behind, and references to earlier decades appear to be declining).1 To take but a prominent example, the formula ‘since the 1970s’ appears some twenty times in the pages of Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and the book counts almost 50 more occurrences of analogous expressions referring to the decade as a watershed. [First paragraphe]

Domains: History

Michele Di Donato. Landslides, Shocks, and New Global Rules: The US and Western Europe in the New International History of the 1970s. Journal of Contemporary History, 2020, 55 (1), pp.182 - 205. ⟨10.1177/0022009419899230⟩. ⟨hal-03608134⟩