Like the 1960s, the 1970s was an era of self-expression. Women, African-Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic-Americans, gays and lesbians and others continued to fight for political rights, but almost more importantly, they began to build self-reliant, self-sustaining communities. At the same time, the ongoing war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal demonstrated to many Americans that the government was corrupt and even criminal, and at any rate was completely disconnected from their interests and concerns. By the end of the decade, many were so frustrated by the turn American public life had taken that they withdrew from it altogether. They embraced popular fads and joined community organizations that did not require them to depend on the government's good intentions or good decisions.

When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, he was the candidate of the "silent majority" - all the white, middle-class Americans who felt alienated from the radical movements they saw around them. They were sick of spoiled hippies and SDSers always getting their way; they were tired of urban blacks getting all the attention. It wasn't the government's job to be coddling these people, they thought. Everyone should be responsible for his or her own problems. Nixon capitalized on this resentment, promising to restore stability at home and honor abroad. He started by dismantling many of the social programs of Johnson's Great Society. For example, in 1973 he abolished the Office of Equal Opportunity, an essential weapon in the War on Poverty, and he tried (but failed) to get Congress to prohibit the use of compulsory busing to desegregate public schools. His domestic plans weren't all conservative - he proposed a Family Assistance Plan that would replace the existing welfare system and guarantee an annual income of $1600 for all Americans - but in general, Nixon's policies tipped the balance in favor of the interests of the middle-class people who felt that Lyndon Johnson's government had ignored them.

Eventually, these people started a movement of their own. Rooted in the brand-new suburbs of the South and West, this "New Right" celebrated individual entrepreneurial success and the free market. Moreover, Sunbelt conservatives lamented the decline - in evidence everywhere around them in the liberal, communitarian 1960s - of religiosity, morality and the family. Their opposition to the secularism, relativism and rules and regulations of the liberal state took many forms. They mobilized against overbearing (they thought) environmental policies in the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, they denounced busing, they participated in highly politicized evangelical revivals that emphasized the importance of traditional gender roles and they launched a crusade against taxes. (This anti-tax sentiment emerged most notably in California in 1978, when Proposition 13 referendum capped property taxes and, according to The New York Times, "amounted to a primal scream by The People against Big Government.") The New Right's exploitation of middle-class resentment laid the groundwork for the populist Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.

But 1960s liberalism was not entirely dead. In particular, the environmental movement flourished in the 1970s. All kinds of people joined the fight against environmental depredations in their own backyards: highways through city neighborhoods; toxic waste at Love Canal, New York; the near-calamity at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania; and the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. They celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970 and the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act that same year. Two years later, they welcomed the Clean Water Act. The oil crisis of the late 1970s made conservation seem even more important. The movement was so mainstream that the U.S. Forest Service's Woodsy Owl interrupted Saturday morning cartoons to remind kids to "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute."

The African-American protests that had defined the 1960s inspired other groups to assert their own rights. For example, the women's movement continued its shift in focus away from legal and economic discrimination - "a fully equal partnership of the sexes," according to NOW's 1966 Statement of Purpose - and toward the eradication and subversion of more systematic kinds of inequalities. They began to develop their own expressly female culture and feminist communities: art galleries, bookstores, cafes, and consciousness-raising groups along with women's health clinics (the Boston Women's Health Book Collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves, an expanded edition of its pamphlet "Women and Their Bodies," in 1973), day-care collectives, rape-crisis centers, and, especially after the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, abortion clinics.

They did not abandon their legislative goals entirely, though. In 1972, Congress finally approved the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution (first introduced in the 1920s), and its ratification, thanks to years of feminist agitation, seemed like a sure thing. By the end of the year, 22 of the needed 35 states had already ratified it. Unfortunately, the ERA alarmed and mobilized many of the newly assertive New Rightists. By the end of the decade - even though polls consistently showed that a majority of Americans supported the amendment - the ERA was dead.

Meanwhile, Native Americans were also demanding that their voices be heard and their grievances be addressed. Even after the Great Society, they still struggled with poverty and unemployment, poor health and health care and inadequate education and housing. In 1968, the same year that Congress passed the Indian Civil Rights Act, a group of young, mostly urban Native Americans established the militant American Indian Movement (AIM). AIM demanded tribal self-determination along with the rights and concessions they believed they were owed. Their protests were provocative. For example, on Thanksgiving Day 1970, AIM members covered Plymouth Rock with red paint, and nearly 1,000 demonstrators spent six destructive days in the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C. in 1972. By the next year, the movement had spread from cities to reservations. In February, AIM activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, demanding changes in tribal government and greater attention from federal officials. In July 1978, in a strategy adapted from the African-American civil rights movement, several hundred Indians marched from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. The marchers wanted to draw attention to the desperate conditions that many Indians still had to endure. By the end of the decade, though Native Americans still had not won full equality, they had taken steps toward a whole host of new rights and protections.

At the same time that all these political groups were quibbling over the responsibilities and limitations of federal authority, Richard Nixon and his aides were introducing Americans to an unprecedented kind of government bungling. Their handling of the ongoing war in Vietnam and the protracted Watergate scandal convinced many people that elected officials could not be relied upon or trusted. Even though fewer and fewer people supported the war in Indochina, Nixon feared that a retreat would signal American weakness and undermine the nation's credibility abroad. So, the conflict dragged on and on. Instead of ending the war, Nixon and his aides devised ways to limit opposition to it, like limiting the draft and shifting the burden of combat onto South Vietnamese soldiers.

This policy worked at the beginning of his term in office, but when the U.S. invaded Cambodia in 1970, all hell broke loose at home. Hundreds of thousands of protestors clogged city streets and shut down college campuses. On May 4, National Guardsmen shot four student demonstrators at an anti-war rally at Kent State University in Ohio. Ten days later, police officers killed two black students at Mississippi's Jackson State. Members of Congress tried to limit the president's power by revoking the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, but Nixon simply ignored them. Even after The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the flimsiness of the government's justifications for war, the bloody and inconclusive conflict continued. Not until 1973 did American troops leave Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and two years later communist troops marched into Saigon.

As his term in office wore on, Nixon grew increasingly paranoid and defensive. He resented any challenge to his authority and approved of almost any attempt to undermine and discredit those who opposed him. That is how the police came to find five burglars at the office of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building in June 1972. It turned out that they had been paid by Nixon's very own Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Furthermore, it emerged that Nixon himself had been involved in covering up the scandal. He had told the FBI to stop investigating the break-in and had encouraged aides to lie about it. By April 1974, the House of Representatives had had enough. It voted on three articles of impeachment (obstruction of justice, misuse of federal agencies and defying the authority of Congress). Before he could be officially impeached, however, the president announced that he would resign. Gerald Ford took over his office, and - to the extreme distaste of many Americans - pardoned Nixon almost immediately.

After Watergate many people withdrew from politics altogether. They turned instead to pop culture - easy to do in such a trend-laden, fad-happy decade. They listened to 8-track tapes of Jackson Browne, Olivia Newton-John, Donna Summer and Marvin Gaye. They made latch-hook rugs and macramé, took up racquetball and yoga, read I'm OK, You're OK and The Joy of Sex, went to wife-swapping parties and smoked even more pot than they had in the 1960s. In general, by the end of the decade, many young people were using their hard-fought freedom to simply do as they pleased: to wear what they wanted, to grow their hair long, to have sex, to do drugs. Their liberation was intensely personal.