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Peter Carroll’s It Seemed Like Nothing Happened offers a glimpse of America during a widely overlooked decade. Contrary to many historians that gloss over the era, Carroll maintains that there was much more to the seventies than meets the eye. Beneath the surface, a seemingly complacent and self-serving population sought alternative sources for change, having become fed up with the government.

Carroll begins with the secrecy and deception of the Nixon administration, which eventually came tumbling to the ground. From the ashes rose the Ford administration, which Carroll categorizes as years of bumbling. With Carter, the country seemed to continue to fall apart at the seams, which Carroll doesn’t entirely blame on the administration.

Political history is only a small part of the work. Carroll also covers a decade of growing cultural unrest in every corner of American society. Seemingly every segment of society was unhappy and increasingly saw government as unable to aid them as America’s status as a superpower apparently slipped. A growing number of Americans believed government itself to be the problem. Written in 1982, the book paints a bleak picture of the decade with a glimmer of hope in the rise of conservative energy at the end of the seventies, the result of mounting frustrations over government failure.

It Seemed Like Nothing Happened is functionally written and paints an excellent picture of a forgotten era. Carroll sometimes overuses quotes, which can seem distracting at times. He largely remains free of bias. In the end, the book is one of the best brief histories of a decade that is largely overlooked and misunderstood. Decades later, it remains an important work.