The year 1970 was grim in the United States and worldwide. Vietnam, continuing civil and political divisions, a fear of growing lawlessness, all seemed to point to a bleak future. The 70s were also a time when traditional boundaries were being challenged, from the color of skin to the length of hair. Sports events, issues, and athletes from the very first year of this tumultuous decade reflect the dramatic changes that were taking place around the country. Nowhere was this more evident than in college football, where the University of Texas became the last all-white national champion in 1970, even as a freshman still ineligible to play was standing by to bring about integration. In Lombardi Dies, Orr Flies, Marshall Cries: The Sports Legacy of 1970, Brad Schultz covers the most significant and momentous sports stories from this single year in American history, reflecting on the deeper impact of these events both on the sporting world and on society as a whole. Integration, homosexuality, drugs, lawsuits, and tragedy all crossed the sporting landscape in 1970, including pivotal moments such as student-athlete protests against racism in college football, the debut of Monday Night Football, a challenge to baseball’s reserve clause, and the plane crash carrying Marshall University’s football team that killed everyone on board. Schultz tells these stories and more, thoughtfully placing them within the context of the political, social, and cultural events taking place across the country and around the world. Many of the athletes from 1970 may no longer be with us, their records may have been broken, and younger athletes may have taken their place, but forty-five years later, it is time to look back and reflect on the significance of the events that took place in this unforgettable sports year. Chronicling a remarkable time in the history of American sports, this book will interest historians, sports fans, and those wanting to learn more about the impact of sports on culture and society.

“Indispensable history.” –Sally Jenkins, bestselling author of The Right Call A captivating chronicle of the pivotal decade in American sports, when the games invaded prime time, and sports moved from the margins to the mainstream of American culture. Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in THE BIG TIME, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade—the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning of athletes’ gaining a sense of autonomy for their own careers, integration becoming—at least within sports—more of the rule than the exception, and the social revolution that brought females more decisively into sports, as athletes, coaches, executives, and spectators. More than politicians, musicians or actors, the decade in America was defined by its most exemplary athletes. The sweeping changes in the decade could be seen in the collective experience of Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali, Henry Aaron and Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Joe Greene, Jack Nicklaus and Chris Evert, among others, who redefined the role of athletes and athletics in American culture. The Seventies witnessed the emergence of spectator sports as an ever-expanding mainstream phenomenon, as well as dramatic changes in the way athletes were paid, portrayed, and packaged. In tracing the epic narrative of how American sports was transformed in the Seventies, a larger story emerges: of how America itself changed, and how spectator sports moved decisively on a trajectory toward what it has become today, the last truly “big tent” in American culture.

In this second volume of Strong on Music, Vera Brodsky Lawrence carries into the 1850s her landmark account of the nineteenth-century New York music scene. Using music entries from George Templeton Strong's famous journals—most published here for the first time—as a point of departure, Lawrence provides a vivid portrait of a vibrant musical culture. Each chapter presents one year in the musical life of New York City, with Lawrence's extensive commentary enriched both by excerpts from Strong's diaries and a lavish selection of little-known music criticism and comment from the period. The reviews, written by an often truculent, sometimes venal tribe of music journalists, cover the entire world of music—from opera to barrel organ, salon to saloon. In this New York, operas performed by renowned artists are parodied by blackface minstrels; performances of the Philharmonic Society are drowned by the raucous chatter of flirtatious adolescents, who turn concerts into a noisy singles' hangout; and irate critics trash the first performances of Verdi operas, calling the plots indecent and the scores noisy and unmelodic. In this volatile atmosphere, a native musical culture is born; its whose first faltering efforts are dubiously received, and the first American composers begin to emerge.

A guide to programs currently available on video in the areas of movies/entertainment, general interest/education, sports/recreation, fine arts, health/science, business/industry, children/juvenile, how-to/instruction.