THE CONTEXT

POLITICAL

 SALT II Treaty:

 The salt II treaty is formally called the “Treaty between the united states of America and the Union of soviet socialist republics on the limitation of strattefic offensive arms. The treaty was signed by both the presidents US president Jimmy carter and soviet president leonid Brezhnev in 1979. this was signed inorder to drop the arms by both the nations.

 In December 1979, The soviet invasion of Afghanistan contributed to a swing to the right in American foreign policy and effectively ended the period of détente, which affected the politics of America as Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy carter in the 1980 presidential election. By the end of 1979, political leaders decided to elect a new afghan leader and send in soviet troops and this failed with a war for the next decade, it worsened the political situation in United states  which showed the aggressive power of soviet union invading other nation.

 White night riots:

Gay rights advocates in New york city protest the light sentence for Dan white, who assassinated san Francisco mayor George moscone and Harvey Milk. In sanfrancisco, the anger escalated to violence called the white night riots.

 Women movements in 1978-79

 The pregnancy discrimination act is passed, the decisions bans employment discrimination against pregnant women

The national coalition against domestic violence forms.

The first take back the night march is staged in san Francisco.

In san Francisco, feminist artist Judy Chicago debuts her art exhibit titiled The Dinner Party, which honors notable women in history.

More than 100,000 people march in Washington DC in support of the ERA and to demand an extension of the time line to get it ratified.

The US house of representatives votes to extend until june 30,1982,the ratification deadline for the ERA, the senate follows a few months later.

NOW launches a new National ERA campaign

 Major legislations in the Year 1978-79

 Airline deregulation act

American Indian Religious freedom act

Age discrimination in employment act amendments

International banking act

Civil service reform act

Federal district and circuit judges act

Revenue act

Ethics in government act

Full employment and balanced growth act

President in 1978-79

 The speech of Mr Jimmy Carter in 1978 shows that America spends around $170 million for foreign oil, which impacts a lot on the economy of the country. Also mentions that their will be a tax reduction and a single family will benefit $250 year.

Analysis:

 Comparing political status of 1978 & 2008:

The 30-year era of deregulation came to a sudden and surprising end on Sept. 16.

Late that evening the Federal Reserve extended $85 billion to take an unprecedented 80 percent stake in American International Group in order to save the floundering insurance giant. Less than two weeks earlier, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had announced that the federal government was taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the colossal mortgage agencies. Suddenly the U.S. financial sector could not survive without government help.

Since the long-ago days when Jimmy Carter was President, regulation has been a dirty word in Washington. Politicians of both parties vied to see how much of the economy they could free from the oppressive yoke of government control. The deregulation movement started when Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Later, as it spread from energy to trucking to telecommunications to financial services, the rallying cry was the same: Less regulation, more growth.

 CULTURAL 

RUBIK’S CUBE:

 The multicoloured puzzle game became popular in 1979 in USA after the article on this game was published by a mathematician David Singmaster in scientific American. The inventor of this puzzle game was Erno Rubik, an Hungarian.

In 1979, the Andrews fund commissioned segal to create public art at Sheridan square, Newyork to commemorate the 1969 stonewall inn riots, in which gays fought police harassment. This even signaled the beginning of the modern gay liberation movement.

 Games:

The north American soccer league (nasl) grew fourfold, from six in 1970 to twenty four in 1979.

Tennis Jimmy connars was ranked number one for five years, from 1974 to 1978.

Movies in 1978

Coming home, Days of heaven, The deer Hunter, Pretty baby, An unmarried women

Movies in 1979

Alein, All that jazz, Apocalypse now, Kramer vs Kramer, The china syndrome.

American social changes in every aspect:

http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade70.html

the most popular fads of the decade 70’s

http://www.crazyfads.com/70s.htm

ECONOMIC

Value of price in USA:

Price Trends in American History

Economic historians and economists have charted the course of prices in the United States from the earliest settlements of the seventeenth century to the present day. Fragmentary information suggests that prices were falling throughout the seventeenth century as the demand for money (shillings) grew faster than the irregular supply. Variations in relative prices across colonies were common, as were localized, and of ten sudden, inflation and deflation. As trade expanded and as the money supply became more regular, prices began to rise and price fluctuations to moderate. The development of wholesale commodity markets in the major port cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston—led to the regular publication of price information in broadsheets or in tabular form in local newspapers known as "Prices Current," and these have facilitated the construction of historical price indexes beginning in the early eighteenth century.

The revolutionary war witnessed one of the first (if not the first, the French and Indian War being a precursor) occurrences of wartime inflation in American history. Prices fell after the mid-1780s but soon rose again sharply beginning in the mid-1790s through the War of 1812. Prices fell sharply from their wartime peak in 1814, and continued to fall until reversing course in the early 1830s. The fall in prices that occurred after the panic of 1837 cemented in place a cyclical pattern in prices that, while hardly new to the economy, would be repeated several times up to and including the Great Depression of the 1930s—prices generally rose smartly during booms, but then fell, sometimes quite abruptly, during a recession.

Following the recession of the early 1840s, the last two decades of the pre–Civil War period were generally a period of rising prices. Beginning in 1843, prices rose more or less continuously until once again declining in the wake of the panic of 1857, but stabilized shortly thereafter. Despite the increases of the preceding twenty years, on the eve of the Civil War the overall level of prices was still well below that experienced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The war years (1861–1865) witnessed substantial—uncontrollable, in the South—increases in prices due to the issuance of paper money by both the Union and Confederate governments. Prices rose sharply, and more importantly, relative to wages, created an "inflation tax" that helped both sides pay for the war effort.

Prices fell after the Civil War, and except for a minor upswing in the early 1880s, continued on a downward trend until the late 1890s, when an expansion in the worldwide supply of gold produced an increase in the money supply and a rising price level that stabilized just before the outbreak of World War I. As during the Civil War, prices rose rapidly during World War I, as the sale of war bonds fostered an expansion of the money supply in excess of the growth of production.

Prices fell sharply after the end of World War I and remained stable for the remainder of the 1920s. Stock prices were an important exception. Fueled by the postwar boom, these prices rose to unprecedented heights, before crashing down in October 1929. The depression that followed was by the far the worst in American history. Just as it had in previous downturns, the price level fell sharply between 1929 and 1933. Money wages also fell, but not as much as prices. Real output per capita decreased, and unemployment soared to nearly a quarter of the labor force in 1933. Prices began to recover after bottoming out in 1932, but fell again when the economy again went into decline late in the decade. In 1940, on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II, the price level was lower than it had been in 1930, and lower still than in the 1920s.

With the entry into the war, the nascent economic recovery accelerated, and unemployment, which had stood at nearly 15 percent in 1940, declined sharply. The war effort put severe upward pressure on prices that, officially at least, was checked through the imposition of wage and price controls in 1942. Unofficially, price rises exceed those recorded by the government: black market activity was rampant, and black market prices do not figure into the official price indexes of the period. After controls were lifted in 1946, the price level rose rapidly, reaching a level in 1950 slightly more than double the level in 1940.

Since 1950, the American economy has experienced a steady and substantial rise in price level, although the rate of increase—the inflation rate—varied across decades. Consumer prices rose by 23 percent in the 1950s and by another 31 percent in the 1960s. These increases were sufficient to prompt the Republican administration of President Richard Nixon to impose wage and price controls from 1971 to 1974. In the end, however, the controls did little to stem rising prices, particularly after an international oil embargo in 1973–1974 caused a sharp spike in energy prices. By the end of the decade, the price level had risen a stunning 112 percent over the levelprevailing in 1970. The price level continued to rise in the 1980s and 1990s but at a much reduced pace. By the end of the 1990s, the cumulative effects of post-1950 increases in the price level were such that one 1999 dollar purchased the equivalent of $0.19 in 1950 prices.

Information on prices is routinely collected by government agencies and by the private sector. At the federal level, much of the responsibility is entrusted to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Indexes produced by these agencies are published regularly in government documents such as Statistical Abstract of the United States and on-line at agency Web sites. For historical price indexes, readers are directed to the various editions of Historical Statistics of the United States.

USA VIEW: 

http://ddp-ext.worldbank.org/ext/ddpreports/ViewSharedReport?&CF=&REPORT_ID=9147&REQUEST_TYPE=VIEWADVANCED&HF=N/CPProfile.asp&WSP=N  

WORLD VEIW

http://ddp-ext.worldbank.org/ext/ddpreports/ViewSharedReport?&CF=&REPORT_ID=9147&REQUEST_TYPE=VIEWADVANCED&HF=N/CPProfile.asp&WSP=N

FUTURE OF USA ECONOMY:

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/Issuebrief203

TECHNOLOGY

Outer space:

In 1978, two pioneer venus probes went into orbit. In 1979, voyager 1 and voyager 2 viseited Jupiter, while pioneer 2 slipped through the Saturn. Moon, charon was discovered around Pluto in 1978. In 1979, the Canadian American team of Robert Dicke and James Peebles questioned the basic assumption in big bang cosmological theory that the universe is flat.

 Robert K. Jarvik introduced the Jarvik-7 artificial heart, which was invented to keep patients alive until a human hear became available for transplant.

Somatostatin became the first human hormone produced by this new technology, followed in 1979 by artificial insulin.

In 1977, a deadly new disease that attacks the immune system was first described in American hospitals and later named AIDS.

The birth of test-tube baby in great Britain in 1978 following a successful in vitro fertilization procedure transformed fertility treatment and provided hope to couples throughout the world. Louise  Brown, the worlds first test-tube baby was born on July 25, 1978. see the statistics.

Apple computer introduced the first disk drive for a PC and VisiCalc put out the first spreadsheet software.

In this year science fiction films became popular like

‘Coma’ The theme is technological Dehumanization.

‘Invation of body snatchers’ observes that the people are becoming less human

‘Battlestar Galactica’

‘Buck Rogers in the twenty-fifth century’

The portable stereo cassette player was developed on Jully 1, 1979 by sony corporation which forever changed the way people listened to and experienced music. Akio Morita, cofounder and chairman of the sony corporation is credited with the development of the walkman. Initially considered a novelty item, the walkman later proved to be a huge product and a marketing success for sony. The first model was TPS-12. This was called the cultural phenomenon.

Analysis of Textile Industry - Its Growth in 70s:

 Since 1960, the textile industry in the west has developed in an unnatural economy. Protectionism has existed for the past thirty years in the textile trade and the last seventeen of those have been regulated by a system called the Multifibre Arrangement. This is a system of trade tariffs and export quotas of byzantine complexity which in effect exists to protect the western textile and clothing industries from market disruption, dumping or tactical undercutting from the low-wage developing countries. Put simply, this agreement has had the effect of blocking a significant number of imports from advanced developing countries, with the consequence that western textiles and western clothing are sold at an artificially high price. It is widely believed that without the support of this system the textile industry in the west would be unable to continue at its current level. In the 1960s and 1970s textile manufacture was perhaps more affected than any other industry in the west by the idea of mass production that was so typified by the photographs of the endless chains of cars lined up on the fiat production lines in the late 1950s. industrialists, particularly in france, Britain and America, became a little mesmerized by the idea of mass production, imagining that engorging vast yardages of cloth at speed would provide a lasting solution to the problem of overseas competition. Due to which the first oil crisis exacerbated in 1970s. This is the moment at which the amalgamation of the companies took palce and the smaller family run busineses were lost, and textile products became standardized or dull. This started at a very good pace in America and Britain, but particularly in Britain, the manufacturing and retail industries became dominated by a few large companies. It was emerging mono culture of the 1970s that spurred rebellion

IMPORTS & EXPORTS IN USA FROM 1960's to 2007:

Analysis:

The data of Exports & Imports of USA from 1960 to 2007,  shows that in the coming future the Imports will increase rapidly and Exports will decrease. We can also see that initially the Exports were very high and Imports was at the start. But in the 70's decade the Imports have paced by increase of 25%.  Also in the year 1985, the exports have decreased to $ 294M and Imports to $73115M. Since then the Exports have been decreasing and Imports have increased drastically. I would say, the Exports have totally become zero in 1985 and it has been at a very low pace since then. Simultaneously we can also observe the balance of both Exports & Imports is -700,258M. We can also see the same trend in Imports from different parts of the world:This clearly metions that the half of the Imports are from CHINA.                                                 

                          Synthesis and Analysis of data in 1970's:

The lifestyle became more fancy in 1970's as disco was getting lot of people attracted with all kind of drugs and cocaine. Simultaneusly the fashion supported with its designs against the culture. Clubs popular in 70's were Gas light clubs & The Playboy clubs. The people began getting urbanised by moving to cities which drove towards the economic development of the country. The main reasons for getting urbanised was mainly the rural conditions. Glenn Fireblough (ASR 1979,Vol 44 April) depicts that in 1850, 2% of the worlds population lived in cities; In 1950's 16% and in 1970's 24% lived in cities, which shows that the urbanisation was very hign in 1970s.

The trend of movies in 1970's was more fictional and predictability like:

                   ALEIN                                           COMA

                                              

Alien movie shows the thinking beyond the world, which deals about the existance of the other world. The Coma shows about the inhumanity.

The popular movie was 'The China Syndrome', which predicts about the future of Explosion in Nuclear Reactors

After the movies releases, The Explosion of Nuclear reactor takes place in USA, which shows that the films are also reality. The other happening movies were 'Coming Home','Days of heaven','An Unmarried Women'.

The Television Shows:

The article by Diane English-Vogue Magazine-1979 Fall - explains about- What viewers want: dynamic new shows: The year had many TV serials mainly on women, which is said as "there are as many roses as thorns, plus interesting new trends in programming". It also says that "television has discovered the women, not as a character, but as a viewer, and in order to reach her, programmers have loaded up their weekly series with single, divorced, widowed and otherwise eligible and attractive men. Examples given are: Brian Dennehy, who stars in CBS's charming whodunit, Big Shamus, Little Shamus, is  a walking bear of a man, who could melt the heart of any demographically desirable women. Also Joe Don Baker of NBC's Eischied police drama, and James vincent Mc Nichol, in CBS's california fever, who is destined to make it as the biggest teen heartthrob since the fonz

The Colour of 1978-79 (Vogue):

BLACK, BLUE-REDS. According to Elizabeth Arden predicts that the Blue-reds willmake sweet music together.

The trend of New Designers of the Year 1978-79:

Gianni Versace: He was designer for Genny, Callaghan, Complice and the Gianni Versace label

Gianfranco Ferre: Vogue magazine refers Ferre as the fashion star, most versatile designer and architect of the fashion. He also made strong impact in American stores.

Jean Baptiste Caumont: He was a designer from france.

This above four persons were considered as the top fashion designers, who can understand the mood of modern women around the world, and make clothes for them.

Reference: Vouge's magazine-1978-Fall.

The fashion industry of 1978-79 mainly concentrated on women wears and the mainly concerned stylist dress code was trim clothes, tailored lines, with more refined shape. lot of heel option.never before colors and, usually, matching textured legs, in heliotrope-new go with everything newtral perforated leather, piped in copper, sergio rossi for carina Nucci.About $140, carina Nucci,NYC:Sakowitz:Bullocks Wilshire,Wilshire Boulevard. Another"must have":a good hand bag for day. This one from Bottega Veneta: a little more structured, compartments that open like an accordion to give you organized space: About $ 150.

Celebrity driven fashion:

Halston was a designer for the celebrities and the public appearanc of the celebrities, made him popular. He used to get lot of orders from them and they can pay  $ 1500 for suits, $1400-$2000 for a coat, $900-$1000 for a little wool jersey day dress or $3000 for one of his twelve-layered iridescent chiffon evening dresses. Its the type of business where Liza Minnelli buys one hundred originals a year, or Kay Graham, The washington post publisher, orders a custom made drip-dry wardrobe for a ten-day trip to Africa to visit heads of state.

Another women or celebrity of great style in 1978-79 was Cynthia Harris, Costume designer Diana Thurley researched fifty outfits that cynthia wears in the role of wallis-a women of great style and none of the costume has a zipper-only hooks and eyes are used and the only fabrics are pure cottons, wools and silks.

Technology introduces many new things in 1979 and some of them are Tarvik 7 artificial heart, which was invented to keep patients alive untill the human heart became available for transplant. Apple introduces the first Disk Drive for apc & Visicalc.

Politics of the Year 1979 marks as the year of friendly relationship for USA with the Union of soviet socialist republic. The SALT II teaty was signed by both the presidents, president of USA Jimmy Carter and soviet president Leonid Brezhev. This year also draws some drawbacks of the president Jimmy Carter, The invasion of US into Afghanisthan contributed to a swing to the right in American foreign policy and this made the United States war with Afghanistan for the next decade. and this led Jimmy carter loose the presidency in the following election in 1982.

The Feminist movement in 1979:

Margaret Thatcher, britains new prime minister and the first woman to head a European government-consistently raises the hopes and the hackles of British subjects across isle. Questions abound: What can a women accomplish in a traditionally male dominated government? Will this self proclaimed non-feminist ever become a model for other women in England and abroad? The criticisms followed were that she is a beautiful woman and beautiful in a way that arouses cynicism. She looks like the heroine of a soap opera.

Margaret's appearance in public in a blue evening dress made by japanese designer YUKI, had lot of affect on fashion as a promoter of fashion.

References: Popular cultures in 70's by Super, John c, American Socialogy Journal, 1978-79,  and the above data. Vogue-1979

Economy:

The Economy of USA was at a normal pace with the both Imports & Exports balancing with Exports of 287965M & Imports of 281657M (Bureau of Economic Analysis) and the GDP was 18.9. The textile industry in that year provided good employment opportunities with 1270 employees per industry (National Economics Acccount). The overall unemployment rate of the country in 1978 was affected. Inflation Rate