Beyond Reagan: The Conservative Revolution in American Life

Kim Phillips-Fein will question the intense focus on Reagan in the historiography of the 1980s, and she will explain the need to broaden the narrative of the political and social history of this decade in general. There is an impulse in much of the recent scholarly literature on conservatism to describe the obstacles that conservatives faced in attaining and exercising power. While there is great merit in such work, historians of the period also need to broaden their study of conservatism in the decade to look at the transformation of the political center and the mainstream, no longer focusing solely on the internal political history of the movement and instead seeing how conservatism fit into the broader changes in American life.