Haberman Clyde (ed.) The times of the seventies The Culture, Politics and Personalities that Shaped the Decade

Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc New York, 2013. — 889 p.-ISBN13: 978-1-60376-333-2.A soldier coming home to New York in early 1970 after 16 months of overseas duty felt as if he had entered a strange land. Sixteen months is not a long time, yet in that stretch the world seemed to have somehow tilted 15 degrees, rendering it all but unrecognizable. People even looked different. Many men suddenly wore their hair long. They sported beards and mustaches. They wore wildly colored clothes. Sure, long hair and psychedelic outfits had been part of the scene for a while. But those fashions were largely the province of political radicals and kids referred to, not always kindly,
as hippies. Now, stockbrokers and insurance agents went around like that. “There’s something happening here,” ran the lyrics of a popular Buffalo Springfield song. That there was. The returning soldier sensed that this decade, still in its infancy, would usher in a thorough break from much of the past.