American History Too!

‘History’s greatest monster’ or an underrated and admirable president? 

We’re back and we’re discussing President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) and his times.  Such are the amount of topics that we need to cover that the podcast will be split into two, with this month’s release dealing primarily with the domestic issues of late 1970s.

Welcome to a land of self-doubt, oil shocks, and a tanking economy, where the issues that would define the ‘culture wars’ for the next four decades were taking shape.  Presiding over it all is the Democratic President James Earl Carter, a born-again Christian from Plains, Georgia who has promised to never lie to the American people.  Was Carter’s presidency consigned to failure by events beyond his control or was the ‘American moralist’ responsible for his own downfall?  Hopefully, by the end of the two podcasts you’ll be able to form your own opinion!

Thanks again for listening,

Mark and Malcolm

@ahtoopodcast

Reading for both podcasts 15a and 15b:

Jimmy Carter, White House diary (New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia changed the balance of power in the Middle East (Oxford:  Oneworld Publications, 2011)

Kenneth Earl Morris, Jimmy Carter:  American moralist (Athens, GA:  University of Georgia Press, 1996)

Scott Kaufman, Plans Unraveled: The Foreign Policy of the Carter Administration (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008)

Dominic Sandbrook, Mad as Hell: the crisis of the 1970s and the rise of the populist Right (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2011)

‘Jimmy Carter’, PBS American Experience (2002)