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The 1980s—A Historiographical Survey

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Vincent J. Cannato
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THE 1980s—A
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY
Vincent J. Cannato

American historians of the twentieth century have too often found themselves prisoners of the
“decade.” The issue of periodization is a perennial challenge, but it seems especially true as historians
grapple with public perceptions of individual decades representing important mileposts. The 1920s
has long been defined with the “Roaring Twenties” of flappers and Prohibition; the 1950s a decade of
prosperity and “conformity”; and the 1960s lives on as an era of social protests and counterculture. A
recent television series by CNN, for instance, has reinforced this historical tyranny of the decades by
running a series of documentaries focused on the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties (with another series
on the Nineties in the works). Historians have both worked within the constraint of the decade, while
also attempting to complicate these ten-year chunks of time.
The 1980s is yet another one of those decades that has come to define an era and a set of historical
themes. There are definitely some legitimate reasons for focusing on the 1980s as a distinct period. It
begins with the election of Ronald Reagan, who epitomized a rightward shift in the Republican Party
and the nation as a whole as he sought to reignite the Cold War with the Soviet Union and at home
sought to rein in the Great Society and reanimate a free-market economy through tax and regulatory
policies. And the decade roughly ends with fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the
Soviet Union in 1991. These events provide a bookend to the decade that one does not find with the
Fifties or Sixties, for instance.
Historians are constrained by the concept of the decade, but also forced to look for broader pat-
terns and themes that liberate us from that constraint. This chapter will try to do both. First, it will
take the 1980s as an important period itself for the rightward political shift represented by Reagan and
the GOP, for the economic transformations that exploded during the decade and for the important
global events that marked the end of the Cold War but at the same time displayed a rising concern
with Middle East politics and the threats of terrorism.
But it is also important to enlarge our understanding of the 1980s beyond just those events that fall
within the decade. It is increasingly difficult to separate out the events of the 1980s from the previ-
ous two decades—as well as from the years that follow. The 1980s are an important era in American
politics and society for what they tell us about larger economic and cultural trends that began in the
years before 1980. For instance, Philip Jenkins argues that Ronald Reagan’s “opportunities to impose
his particular vision were shaped by a wide variety of developments, social, economic, demographic
and cultural, which were all under way well before the critical 1980 election.”1
Similarly, the impact of the 1980s can been seen in subsequent decades, with the 1990s in many
ways a continuation of political and economic policies, as well as cultural debates, that dominated the

84
 The 1980s

earlier decade. Yet, viewing this period after 2008, that interpretation is in some doubt. On every front,
the apparent political, economic and cultural realignment brought about by the election of Ronald
Reagan looks less certain, less sturdy and more ephemeral. Writing in 2009, this author and Gil Troy
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concluded that “the Reagan Revolution may not have been the great victory that many of its support-
ers hope for and many of its critics feared.”2 That interpretation may too evolve as the years pass, but it
reminds us that our understanding of American history post-1960s will likely be in flux for some time.

***
The 1980s cannot be understood without seeing the decade as part of the changes the nation
experienced in the late 1960s and 1970s. There are a number of good histories of the 1970s that see
the decade as a kind of prelude to the 1980s. Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies actually spans the years
1969–1984. The economic troubles of the 1970s, the decline in U.S. influence abroad and weakening
of the military after Vietnam and the residual cultural tensions from the late 1960s all laid the ground-
work for the election of Ronald Reagan. More Americans began to trust markets over government,
entrepreneurship was on the rise and the growth of the Sunbelt and decline of northern cities meant
a demographic shift in favor of individualistic, right-leaning Republicans.3
While there is a growing body of work on the 1970s, one obvious problem in discussing the
historiography of the 1980s is that the period is still so recent that the literature is only beginning to
develop, with Robert Collins, John Ehrman, Philip Jenkins and Gil Troy writing some of the most
cogent histories of the decade so far.4 A disproportionate number of books on this period are devoted
to the life and presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose administration and legacy remain at the heart of
any discussion of the 1980s. He dominates his era as no other modern president, with the exception
of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 1930s.
Whereas FDR had his New Deal, the 1980s are known for “Reaganomics” and the “Reagan Revo-
lution,” which further personalize the politics of the era. Historians continue to debate the impact
of the “Reagan Revolution” and whether it can even be a considered a revolution in any meaningful
sense, but it will be very difficult for historians to disentangle Reagan from any study of this period. A
sampling of recent books on the period reinforces this idea: The Age of Reagan, The Eighties: American
in the Age of Reagan, Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981–1989 and Morning in America: How
Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s.5
The earliest assessments of Reagan mirrored the political assessment of partisan Democrats such
as Tip O’Neill, who called him “the most ignorant man who had ever occupied the White House,”
and Clark Clifford, who referred to Reagan as an “amiable dunce.” In this reading, Reagan was an
intellectually lazy ultraconservative whose only skill was his ability to communicate to the public,
something related to his previous acting career. Early books by liberal journalists Haynes Johnson and
Sidney Blumenthal represented this interpretation.6
Less polemical early interpretations of Reagan by Robert Dallek, Michael Schaller and Garry Wills
were still dismissive of Reagan, painting a picture of a president who was able to sell a mythological
portrait of America to a gullible American public. To Wills, Reagan was “Mr. Magoo,” bumbling
through his presidency comforted by the myths he created and blind to the alleged troubles that sur-
rounded him. Most famously, Reagan managed to elude his authorized biographer, Edmund Morris,
who was so puzzled by the challenge of writing about Reagan that he bizarrely created a fictional alter
ego to help narrate the book.7
That portrait of Reagan soon began to change. Former Washington Post journalist Lou Cannon,
who covered Reagan as both governor of California and president, published President Reagan: The
Role of a Lifetime in 1991. Unlike earlier books on Reagan, Cannon’s biography considered Reagan not
as an historical aberration or psychologically limited individual, but rather as a conventional politician
who sought to reshape the nation’s political landscape. Cannon’s biography opened up the field for a
more serious and measured appraisal of the Reagan years.

85
 Vincent J. Cannato

Reagan was no longer “Mr. Magoo,” but rather a consequential president who helped transform
American society, albeit in ways that were still being contested by historians. That fact was clear by
the early decades of the twenty-first century as academic historians were publishing biographies that,
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while more critical of Reagan’s policies, also began to see Reagan in a different light. John Patrick
Diggins compared Reagan to Abraham Lincoln, writing that “both exceptional presidents were polit-
ically wise, humane and magnanimous. Each had greatness of soul.” Sean Wilentz wrote paradoxically
that even with Reagan’s “many failures, regressive policies and dangerous legacies . . . his achievement
actually looks more substantial than the claims invented by the Reaganite mythmakers.”8
Conservative authors and right-leaning academics and authors have also set out to shape the Rea-
gan legacy. While some merely serve as “court histories” of the conservative movement and the
Reagan years, others have added important pieces to the historiography of this period.9 By far the
most influential of these books was the 2001 edited collection by Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson
and Martin Anderson titled Reagan in His Own Hand. Consisting of mostly Reagan’s radio com-
mentaries from the 1970s and mostly written by Reagan, the entries in this book show Reagan’s own
responses to a variety of political issues. This was not a portrait of politician who was merely good at
reading the lines that others had written for him, but rather someone who had clearly spent a great
deal of time thinking through his conservative ideas.10
In 2003, W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham put together a group of historians and
political scientists to reevaluate Reagan’s presidency and found that while Reagan was not quite as
successful as many of his conservative defenders argued, he could still claim “a potent political legacy”
for his brand of “pragmatic conservatism.” Until the late 1990s, Reagan had generally appeared in the
bottom half of American presidents in the periodic rankings by scholars, such as Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr.’s 1996 poll. Beginning around 2000, Reagan’s stock among scholars began to grow, and he would
soon find himself regularly ranked in the top ten among presidents. With greater distance, historians
began to rethink their earlier dismissal of Reagan’s presidency and understood the impact of his con-
servative politics on American society, even if they did not always agree with his politics.11
The area upon which Reagan’s reputation stands most firmly is foreign affairs, especially as it relates
to the end of the Cold War. Reagan came to office with a clear set of principles in mind: He would
revive the notion of containing communism, which had been partly discredited in the aftermath of
Vietnam and the rise of détente, and challenge the legitimacy of the Soviet state. Reagan set out to
rebuild the U.S. military and restart the arms race. Beth Fischer, Jeffrey Chidester and Paul Kengor
made the case for the success of Reagan’s foreign policy in the Cold War. John Ehrman described
the impact of the neoconservative ideology in pushing Republican foreign policy in a more hawkish
direction. Paul Lettow detailed Reagan’s longtime interest in abolishing nuclear weapons and how
those views impacted his presidency. Odd Arne Westad and James Scott outlined the impact of the
Reagan Doctrine’s policy of intervention in the Third World.12
The Reagan administration also saw a shift in the leadership of the Soviet Union as Mikhail Gor-
bachev set about to reform the communist system in the hopes of reversing the Russian economy’s
steady collapse. Despite negotiating historic arms control treaties with Reagan, Gorbachev could not
hold the communist bloc together. Wisely, he refused to intervene in Eastern Europe after the Berlin
Wall fell, but could not keep the Soviet Union together. In 1991, the Cold War ended with whimper,
not a bang. In the immediate years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, political scientists Richard
Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein argued that We All Lost the Cold War, yet more recent studies have
eschewed such pessimism. Another debate centered on the question of who should get credit for
ending the Cold War. Some, like John Lewis Gaddis, have given Reagan a great deal of credit, while
others like Melvyn Leffler have given more credit to Gorbachev. That debate may mostly be semantic
as historians such as Jack Matlock, James Mann, James Graham Wilson and Robert Service increas-
ingly see the final days of the Cold War as a product of both U.S. and Russian policies, as well as the
personal leadership of both Reagan and Gorbachev.13

86
 The 1980s

From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the Middle East appears to be an impor-
tant subtext to the larger Cold War diplomacy of the 1980s. Steve Coll and Bruce Reidel outlined
America’s role in the Soviet-Afghanistan war of the 1980s. David Crist’s The Twilight War described
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America’s continuing conflict with Iran since the 1979 revolution, while Kai Bird’s biography of CIA
officer Robert Ames, who died in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, revealed impor-
tant details about U.S. policy in the Middle East in the early 1980s. Malcolm Byrne’s history of the
Iran-Contra scandal was the most recent attempt to untangle that murky episode in Reagan’s foreign
policy. These books painted a more complicated picture than the histories of Reagan-era foreign
policy focused solely on Russia and Eastern Europe.14
Unlike foreign policy, historians have not written as widely on the economy of the 1980s or the
economic and fiscal policies of the Reagan administration. Judith Stein and Jefferson Cowie have
written on the impact of deindustrialization on the working class in the 1970s, a trend that was deeply
felt in the 1980s. Robert Collins’s history of economic growth in the postwar period perceptively
put the Reagan years into a broader economic perspective. Mark Levinson used the history of the
shipping container to chart the economic changes and globalization of the postwar period. Joseph
McCartin and Nelson Lichtenstein examined the fate of organized labor during this time of con-
servative ascendancy. Kim Phillips-Fein and Angus Burgin traced the intellectual roots of the free-
market economics that blossomed in the 1980s.15
At the same, another branch of scholarly analysis has focused on the dominance of “neoliberalism,”
which David Harvey defined as the idea “that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating
individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by
strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” Harvey, Manfred Steger and Daniel Sted-
man Jones saw the period beginning in the 1970s as a time of a revival in free-market economics that
swept not just the United States, but also England, China, South Korea and Latin America.16
The focus on ideological conservatism has been one of the most fruitful areas of historical inquiry.
Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, published in the late 1980s,
early on helped establish the centrality of Reagan’s election as a political and ideological rupture point
for a new conservative movement. Written from the political left, the essays in the collection saw the
Reagan years as a repudiation of the “New Deal Order,” with different political and economic pri-
orities from the social democratic goals of the New Deal. “When Ronald Reagan assumed office in
January of 1981, an epoch in the nation’s political history came to an end,” wrote Fraser and Gerstle.
“The New Deal, as a dominant order of ideas, public policies, and political alliances, died, however
much its ghost still hovers over a troubled polity.” To the authors, the Reagan years were most clearly
a political and ideological “Counter-Reformation.”17
Still, in the years immediately after Reagan left office, academic historians did little to explore
American conservatism. In his oft-cited 1994 essay “The Problem of American Conservatism,” Alan
Brinkley wrote that “twentieth-century American conservatism has been something of an orphan in
historical scholarship.” Brinkley probably underestimated the number of works on conservatism that
existed by the early 1990s, but his overall point was still valid. Looking at America in the wake of the
presidency of Ronald Reagan and the seeming crisis of American liberalism, Brinkley suggested that
historians needed to look beyond the central role played by New Deal liberalism and the challenges
presented to that liberalism by the New Left and other social movements.18
A mere seventeen years later, the historiographical landscape looked decidedly different. Kim
Phillips-Fein reassessed Brinkley’s earlier challenge and noted that in the subsequent years, the histori-
cal study of conservatism had become “one of the most dynamic subfields in American history.” In
the forum that accompanied Phillips-Fein’s essay, Lisa McGirr asked: “Now That Historians Know So
Much about the Right, How Should We Best Approach the Study of Conservatism?”19
But this emphasis on the impact and influence of conservatism—especially as it relates to the
1980s—can give the impression that there was little more to this period than right-wing politics.

87
 Vincent J. Cannato

This is similar to the historiography of the 1960s, with many early studies heavily focused on liberal
protest movements and the counterculture while ignoring the large swaths of American society that
did not participate in these social movements.
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Bradford Martin’s The Other Eighties: The Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan was a reminder
that the 1980s were more than just a decade of conservatism. Martin discussed left-wing opposition
to the Reagan administration such as the nuclear freeze movement, anti-apartheid campaigns on
college campuses, African American politics, AIDS activists and feminist politics. Michael Steward
Foley, Van Gosse and Richard Moser also highlighted the varieties and potencies of liberal activism
down through the 1980s, with Moser arguing that “the movements of the 1960s created a durable, if
variegated, alternative American public . . . a halfway revolution that produced conflict and meaning-
ful debate for the rest of the century.” Liberalism, though it struggled in the post-Sixties era, proved
far more durable than conservatives or many liberals originally thought, leading to cultural battles
becoming just as important during the 1980s as those fought over economics or foreign policy.20
The sense of cultural change and turmoil heightened in the later years of the 1980s, as the term
“culture war” gained currency. Abortion, guns, gay rights and multiculturalism would become not
just cultural flashpoints, but would also help shape the Republican and Democratic parties, as more
religious and traditional Americans began to gravitate into the former and secular and more liberal
Americans into the latter. James Davison Hunter first highlighted the importance of the “culture
wars” in 1991, while Andrew Hartman recently took a more historical approach to the topic. Robert
O. Self traced debates over the family and sexuality from the cultural changes of the 1960s to the
response by “Pro-Family” conservatives in the 1980s.21
The focal points of many of these battles would be American colleges and universities. The unex-
pected bestseller of the decade—Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind—set the tone for
conservative criticisms of higher education. Books by Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza also took
aim at the intellectual life of American colleges, criticizing what they saw as the increasing dominance
of left-wing ideology on campuses and foreshadowing what would soon be termed “political correct-
ness.” From the other side of the spectrum, Susan Faludi’s bestseller Backlash saw the social and political
conservatism of the 1980s as a direct threat to advances that women and the feminist movement had
made since the 1960s.22
Central to many of the cultural debates of the decade was religion, most specifically the rise of
evangelical Christianity, which not only played an important role in political conservatism and divi-
sions over social issues such as abortion, but also marked an important turning point in how Ameri-
cans worshipped and viewed the relationship between religion and politics. What makes the story
of evangelical Christianity important to the 1980s is that it grew at the same time that mainstream
Christian sects began to decline. At the same time, evangelicals had begun to become politically active
after a long history of ambivalence to politics. In varying ways, historians such as Kenneth Heineman,
Bethany Moreton, Steven Miller, Darren Dochuk, Daniel Williams and Matthew Avery Sutton have
studied the recent history of evangelical conservatism and its intersection with politics.23
Religion helped to define the politics of the 1980s, and so did race. The 1980s are not seen as a
high point in the history of civil rights, with affirmative action coming under criticism from conser-
vatives and southern whites increasingly shifting their allegiance to the Republican party. Historians
such as Dan Carter, Matthew Lassiter, Kevin Kruse and Joseph Crespino all stressed the importance
of race in accounting for the electoral success of Reagan and the rise of a more conservative politics,
especially in the South and in the suburbs. Following the path of Thomas Byrne Edsall’s 1991 book
Chain Reaction, they all placed race at the center of their narratives on the rise of modern conservatism.
Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime represented a shift in analysis as more
scholars looked at the racial dimensions of the “war on drugs” and tougher law enforcement over-
all, arguing that such policies have led to mass incarceration, which has significantly and negatively
impacted black communities.24

88
 The 1980s

Race became more complicated in the 1980s as the country witnessed a larger and more diverse
influx of immigrants thanks to the reforms of the 1965 Immigration Act. In the 1980s, 6.24 million
immigrants arrived, compared to 4.25 million during the previous decade. New immigrants were
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increasingly non-white, many coming from Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. In addition to
the rise of legal immigrants, concern over the number of immigrants illegally in the country grew,
leading to the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The law made it illegal for
employers to knowingly hire undocumented immigrants, but also offered a legal pathway to citizen-
ship for almost 3 million people in the country illegally. Much of the work dealing with immigra-
tion during the 1980s came from political scientists and sociologists, such as Aristide Zolberg, Daniel
Tichenor and Nancy Foner, while Mary Waters, Reed Ueda, Leonard Dinnerstein, David Reimers and
Marilynn Johnson all began the process of mapping out the histories of this post-1965 immigration.25
In hindsight, immigration during the 1980s appears an even more central development than it
did during the decade itself. The same can be said of the politics of AIDS during the 1980s and the
burgeoning gay rights movement, which would culminate nearly three decades later in the legaliza-
tion of gay marriage. Christopher Capozzola probed the ways that the AIDS memorial quilt meshed
identity politics with historical memory. Elizabeth Armstrong, Susan Chambre, Jennifer Brier and
Deborah Gould wrote about the grassroots organizing that helped force a political response to the
AIDS crisis, thereby creating a national gay rights movement that sought a broader acceptance of
homosexuality in American society. The deeper historians delve into the social and cultural nuances
of the 1980s, the more they are able to complicate the notion of the 1980s as simply representing the
“Age of Reagan.”26

***
What can be said about the 1980s when the era’s historiography is still in its infancy? Much of the
reappraisal of Reagan and his policies occurred before the Great Recession of 2008. In 2007, Robert
Collins summed up the decade by writing that the

American people got in the 1980s pretty much what they wanted—a country at once more
competitive and efficient and more tolerant and inclusive; a country that worked hard and
well and that allowed its citizens the freedom, within the broadest of boundaries, to be them-
selves. That combination was unusual, both in the contemporary world and, most certainly,
in human history.

After the economic disruptions of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama as president, this positive
view of the 1980s is open for debate.
Historians will continue to debate the legacy of the Reagan administration and probe how deep
the roots of this conservative “reformation” actually went. They will broaden our view of this period,
looking for continuities with 1960s and 1970s as well as discontinuities. Longer economic, social and
cultural patterns will become apparent and transform how we view this period. Will the 1980s appear
as a distinct period of American history that changed the trajectory of American politics and society,
or will Reaganite conservatism seem more of an aberration within a much larger pattern of govern-
ment expansion and social liberalism? Or will the patterns that governed America since World War II
be completely upended in the twenty-first century and replaced by political, economic and cultural
directions that scholars cannot yet make out?
Nothing displays the evolution of this rapidly shifting terrain of interpretation more than the con-
trast between two influential works of the post-Cold War period. In 1989, Francis Fukayama published
an essay, “The End of History?,” which pondered whether the end of the Cold War marked “the end
point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the
final form of human government.” Fukayama’s essay has come to represent an ideological triumphalism

89
 Vincent J. Cannato

for liberal democratic capitalism. Two decades later, historian Daniel Rodgers provided a different
view of the same period, seeing the period since the 1970s as an “Age of Fracture” where “imagined
collectivities shrank” and “notions of structure and power thinned out” among the public. Rodgers’s
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was a less triumphal vision, one that saw the underpinnings of liberal democracy as more fragile than
Fukayama, who has since the publication of his essay backtracked a bit from his earlier views.27
In the early twenty-first century, Americans are grappling with the effects of deindustrialization,
globalization, multiculturalism, declining faith in institutions and technological changes that will
continue to transform dramatically how we live. Historians too must deal with how to describe these
changes and what they mean to the country and the world. For many years, the 1980s appeared to
have been a pivotal and unique period in American economic, political and cultural history. Writing
more than a quarter century after Reagan left office, however, that judgment appears more fragile and
less secure.

Notes
1 Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 23.
2 Gil Troy and Vincent J. Cannato, eds., Living in the Eighties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8.
3 On the 1970s, see David Frum, How We Got Here: The 1970s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (New
York: Basic Books, 2000); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and
Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001); Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds., America in the Seventies (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2004); Edward D. Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview
of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds.,
Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008);
Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010);
Dominic Sandbrook, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (New York: Anchor
Books, 2011); Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History From Civil Rights to Economic Inequality
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
4 Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005); John Ehrman, The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005);
James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush vs. Gore (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2005); Michael Schaller, Right Turn: American Life in the Reagan-Bush Era, 1980–1992 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert M. Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan
Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
5 Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980 (Roseville, CA: Prima Publish-
ing, 2001); Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer, Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981–1989 (Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011); Ehrman, The Eighties.
6 Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years (New York: Anchor Books, 1992);
Sidney Blumenthal, Our Long National Nightmare: A Political Pageant of the Reagan Era (New York: Harper and
Row, 1988).
7 Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984),
viii–ix; Michael Schaller, Reckoning With Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 181–182; Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (Garden City, NY: Double-
day Press, 1987); Garry Wills, “Mr Magoo Remembers,” The New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990;
Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999).
8 John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 2007); Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: HarperCollins Publish-
ers, 2008); H. W. Brands, Reagan: The Life (New York: Doubleday Press, 2015). Another example comes from
the “American Presidents Series.” Jacob Weisberg, Ronald Reagan (New York: Times Books, 2016). For a
perceptive interpretation of Reagan’s rise to become governor of California, see Matthew Dallek, The Right
Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (New York: Free Press,
2000).
9 A sample of some conservative histories of Reagan and his presidency are Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War: The
Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism (New York: Doubleday Press, 2002);
Paul Kengor and Peter Schweizer, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Assessing the Man and His Legacy (Lanham, MD:

90
 The 1980s

Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Thomas W. Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years
and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Steven F.
Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989 (New York: Crown Forum, 2009);
Craig Shirley, Rendezvous With Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America (Wilmington,
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DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books, 2009).

10 Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan, in His Own Hand: The Writings of
Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (New York: Touchstone, 2001); Kiron K. Skinner,
Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York: Free Press, 2003).
11 W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism (Lawrence, KS:
University Press of Kansas, 2003).
12 John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994 (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1995); Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia,
MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997); Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
(New York: Random House, 2005); Jeffrey L. Chidester and Paul Kengor, eds., Reagan’s Legacy in a World
Transformed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); James M. Scott, Deciding to Intervene: The Rea-
gan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Odd Arne Westad, The Global
Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).
13 John Lewis Gaddis, The New Cold War: A History (New York: Penguin Press, 2005); Melvyn P. Leffler, For the
Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Richard
Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995);
Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004); James
Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (New York: Viking Press, 2009);
James Graham Wilson, The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End
of the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Robert Service, The End of the Cold War, 1985–1991
(New York: Public Affairs, 2015).
14 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to
September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Bruce Riedel, What We Won: America’s Secret War in
Afghanistan, 1979–1989 (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2014); David Crist, The Twilight War: The
Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran (New York: Penguin Press, 2012); Kai Bird, The Good
Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (New York: Crown Publishers, 2014); Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra:
Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014).
15 Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2010); Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings
of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s
and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010); Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of
Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Mark Levinson, The Box: How
the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2006); Joseph A. McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike
That Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nicholas Lichtenstein, State of the Union:
A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible
Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 2009); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
16 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Manfred B. Steger,
Neoliberalism: A Very Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Daniel Stedman Jones, Mas-
ters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2012).
17 Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989), ix.
18 Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (April 1994).
Books on conservatism that existed pre-1994 include Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant
Far Right From the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Jerome L.
Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990); George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books,
1976).
19 Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (December
2011); Lisa McGirr, “Now That Historians Know So Much About the Right, How Should We Best Approach

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the Study of Conservatism?” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (December 2011). The body of scholarly
appraisals of conservatism and its influence on Republican politics is vast. Some examples include: Mary C.
Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995); Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United
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States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995); John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for
Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Gregory L.
Schneider, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (New York:
New York University Press, 1999); Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American
Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and
the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors the
Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); John Micklethwait and
Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Donald
T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005); Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Kevin Mattson, Rebels All! A Short History of the Conserva-
tive Mind in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Steven M. Teles, The Rise
of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008); Gregory L. Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2009); Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012); Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation
of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the
Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2016).
20 Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: The Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2011), xiv; Van Gosse and Richard Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent
America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 48; Michael Stewart Foley, Front Porch Politics: The For-
gotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013).
21 James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Andrew
Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015); Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill
and Wang, 2012).
22 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished
the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Lawrence Levine provided a response to
Bloom in The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). Roger
Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1990);
Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991); Susan
Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991).
23 Kenneth Heineman, God Is a Conservative: Religion, Politics, and Morality in Contemporary America (New York:
New York University Press, 1998); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free
Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the
Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to
Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton
and Company, 2010); Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010); Steven P. Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
24 Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991); Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of
the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); Kevin M.
Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005);
Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2012); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration
in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). For a broader discussion of the history of race
and the Republican party before the 1980s, see Timothy N. Thurber, Republicans and Race: The GOP’s Frayed
Relationship With African Americans, 1945–1974 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2013).
25 Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2002); Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America

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(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda, The New Americans: A Guide to
Immigration Since 1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Leonard Dinnerstein and David M.
Reimers, The World Comes to America: Immigration to the United States Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012); Marilynn S. Johnson, The New Bostonians: How Immigrants Have Transformed the Metro Area Since
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the 1960s (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015); Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New
York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Nancy Foner, ed., One
Out of Three: Immigrant New York in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
26 Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002); Christopher Capozzola, “A Very American Epidemic: Memory Politics
and Identity Politics in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1985–1993,” in Gosse and Moser, eds., The World the Six-
ties Made: Susan Chambre, Fighting for Our Lives: New York’s AIDS Community and the Politics of Disease (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the
AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Deborah Gould, Moving Politics:
Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
27 Francis Fukayama originally published his essay “The End of History?” in the journal The National Interest no.
16 (Summer 1989). He extended the essay into book form with The End of History and the Last Man (New
York: Free Press, 1992). Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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