The 1970's

The 1970s opened in conflict.On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced the expansion of U.S. military operations into Cambodia.

Days later, four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. On May 8, construction workers attacked antiwar demonstrators in what became known as the Hard Hat Riot, one of the defining images of a country bitterly divided over Vietnam, protest, and generational change.

In the third installment of Disturbing History’s series on the American decades, Brian turns to the 1970s—the decade when the young people everyone had spent years worrying about finally began inheriting the country.

The voting age dropped to eighteen with the 26th Amendment. The military draft ended. American prisoners of war came home. Smallpox was pushed toward eradication. The microprocessor arrived, environmental protections expanded, and Voyager carried a golden record filled with sounds and greetings from Earth toward the stars.

Then Brian turns the photograph over.The decade exposed extraordinary abuses of government power. The burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania helped reveal domestic surveillance programs. Congressional investigations uncovered CIA and FBI misconduct, while the Church Committee documented intelligence programs including NSA access to international telegram traffic.

The Pentagon Papers further exposed how successive administrations had privately understood the Vietnam War very differently from the way it was often presented publicly. The episode also examines the disasters, scandals, panics, and strange cultural moments that defined the decade: Buffalo Creek, the Teton Dam collapse, deadly aviation failures, the Browns Ferry nuclear fire, the Legionnaires’ outbreak, the 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign, the Chowchilla school-bus kidnapping, fears surrounding youth culture, the rise of deprogramming, the Dungeons & Dragons panic, the Amityville story, the Howard Hughes autobiography hoax, and Chicago’s infamous Disco Demolition Night.

And running beneath it all is the same question this series keeps returning to: Was the generation coming up really destroying America—or was an older generation simply watching the country change? By the end of the 1970s, the first baby boomers were entering their thirties and raising children of their own.

Those children would grow up with seat belts, car seats, lower lead exposure, computers, and a very different America.

And eventually, they too would grow old enough to complain about the generation coming behind them.



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Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.

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