Happy Days: Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America

Happy Days investigates how 1970s popular culture was obsessed with America’s past, but offered radically different interpretations of the same historical events and icons. Looking at representations of 1950s teenagers, the noir detective, America’s bicentennial, and neo-slave narratives, Benjamin Alpers examines how American history provoked both nostalgia and deep soul searching.