The 1970s Portal

The1970s (pronounced "nineteen-seventies"; commonly shortened to the "Seventies" or the "'70s") was a decade that began on January 1, 1970, and ended on December 31, 1979.

In the 21st century, historians have increasingly portrayed the 1970s as a "pivot of change" in world history, focusing especially on the economic upheavals^[1] that followed the end of thepostwar economic boom.^[2] On a global scale, it was characterized by frequent coups, domestic conflicts and civil wars, and various political upheavals and armed conflicts which arose from or were related to decolonization, and the global struggle betweenNATO, theWarsaw Pact, and theNon-Aligned Movement. Many regions had periods of high-intensity conflict, notably Southeast Asia, the Mideast, and Africa.

In the Western world,social progressive values that began in the1960s, such as increasing political awareness and economic liberty of women, continued to grow. In the United Kingdom, the1979 election resulted in the victory of itsConservative leaderMargaret Thatcher, the first female British Prime Minister. Industrialized countriesexperienced an economic recession due toan oil crisis caused by oil embargoes by theOrganization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries. The crisis saw the first instance ofstagflation which began a political andeconomic trend of the replacement ofKeynesian economic theory withneoliberal economic theory, with the first neoliberal government coming to power with the1973 Chilean coup d'état.The 1970s was also an era of great technological and scientific advances; since the appearance of the first commercial microprocessor, theIntel 4004 in 1971, the decade was characterised by a profound transformation of computing units – by then rudimentary, spacious machines – into the realm of portability and home accessibility.

On the other hand, there were also great advances in fields such as physics, which saw the consolidation ofquantum field theory at the end of the decade, mainly thanks to the confirmation of the existence of quarks and the detection of the first gauge bosons in addition to the photon, the Z boson and the gluon, part of what was christened in 1975 as theStandard Model.

In Asia, the People's Republic of China's international relations changed significantly following its recognition by the United Nations, the death ofMao Zedong and the beginning of market liberalization by Mao's successors. Despite facing an oil crisis due to the OPEC embargo, the economy of Japan witnessed a large boom in this period, overtaking the economy of West Germany to become the second-largest in the world.^[3] The United States withdrew its military forces from theVietnam War. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which led to theSoviet–Afghan War.

The 1970s saw an initial increase in violence in the Middle East as Egypt and Syria declared war on Israel, but in the late 1970s, the situation in the Middle East was fundamentally altered when Egypt signed theEgyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty. Political tensions in Iran exploded with theIranian Revolution in 1979, which overthrew thePahlavi dynasty and established anIslamic republic under the leadership ofAyatollah Khomeini.