Reviewed by: After Aquarius Dawned: How the Revolutions of the Sixties Became the Popular Culture of the Seventies by Judy Kutulas Alex Jacobs (bio) After Aquarius Dawned: How the Revolutions of the Sixties Became the Popular Culture of the Seventies. By Judy Kutulas. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2017. Pp. 274. $90.00 cloth; $29.95 paper; $19.99 ebook) In After Aquarius Dawned, historian Judy Kutulas challenges the stereotype of the 1970s as a narcissistic me-decade when Americans withdrew from public life and turned inward. Exploiting a range of sources, including the UCLA television archive, government reports, newspapers, memoirs, and an array of secondary literature, Kutulas argues that the 1970s represented the moment when the 1960s' ethos embedded itself in everyday life. Focusing on the era's popular culture, After Aquarius Dawned comprises six case studies: singer-songwriters, the "peacock revolution" in men's fashion, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Alex Haley's Roots, sexual minorities on television, and press coverage of the Jonestown massacre. Across these phenomena, Kutulas contends, one can observe the emergence of a morality committed to tolerance, personal freedom, communities of choice rather than ascription, and a hostility to indifferent and corrupt "establishments" of all kinds. In Kutulas's view, cultural producers played an outsized role in the baby-boom generation's reimagining of work, family, and community. Singer-songwriters like Carole King helped young people make sense of "relationships," novel arrangements that existed somewhere between old rituals of courtship and the counterculture's free love. The Mary Tyler Moore Show normalized single life for young women, as well as the notion that "workplace families" of peers could transcend the drudgery of work. Following the Jonestown disaster, journalists encouraged Americans to see themselves as skeptics, too independent to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid. By the end of the decade, sixties values manifested in everything from the writing of history to footwear design. Indeed, even as conservatives seized the political initiative, they found it impossible to reverse the transformation of American culture. [End Page 567] After Aquarius Dawned's argument is smooth and Kutulas's prose unfailingly clear. Kutulas does not pick pointless fights with other scholars and does not get lost in the labyrinth of cultural studies. Yet the book's strongest feature is its rendering of pop culture as a site of moral struggle. Far from frivolous self-involvement, the mainstreaming of the 1960s meant the displacement of an older system of values based on duty, obedience, and sacrifice by a new sensibility emphasizing pleasure, rebelliousness, and skepticism. Further, Kutulas does not flinch from the role that the obsessive pursuit of baby boomer dollars played in shaping the new morality. Here, screenwriters, advertisers, and network executives appear as cultural brokers, aggressively cultivating sixties-style ideals one day and pruning them back the next. Calibrating cultural products to the contradictory whims of the marketplace thus created an outlook that was "modern, but not too radical" (p. 101). In projects as ambitious as After Aquarius Dawned, there are inevitably areas that warrant more investigation. The richness of Kutulas's exploration of the 1970s moral revolution is not matched by the examinations of the counter-revolutions against it. Christopher Lasch, for example, appears as the prototypical representative of the me-decade critique, but we hear little about his background or ideas. Similarly, the book might have attended more to 1970s movements including punk and heavy metal, which arrayed themselves against both the establishment and the 1960s counterculture. When Dinah Shore asked Iggy Pop in 1977 if he had influenced anyone, he replied, "I think I helped wipe out the sixties." It may be too much for one book, but if we want to understand the 1970s in its totality, we will need to hold the New Sensibility and its antagonists in a single analytical frame. With After Aquarius Dawned, Kutulas has given us a work of significant historiographical value. Along with Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive and Philip Jenkins's Decade of Nightmares, After Aquarius Dawned provides an excellent introduction to the cultural history of the 1970s and the strange new moral landscape it ushered into being. [End Page 568] Alex Jacobs ALEX JACOBS is...