In his foreword to I am a Stranger in a Strange Land, Dr. Irving Andre describes the protagonist, Tio Mourillon, as the embodiment of every man. The issues of life are threfore played out in each casual conversation. Very few who read the book will ever work in industrial blast furnaces, but everyone who has ever worked in a factory or in an industrial environment will have known someone like Ted Barnes.
Within everyone's life, the issues of the era are played out in their day-to-day dramas, arguments, debates about who built the Taj Mahal or whether a working class person should aspire to a university education.
The links above outline a few of them.