The 1960s Revisited

The Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Summer of Love--the 1960s were one of the most turbulent decades in US history. These years launched an unprecedented public debate over the meaning of "America," dividing US society in deep and troubling ways. Yet despite the passage of time, the contemporary crises in the "American way of life" and the political system that sustain it might well make one wonder: to what degree are we still living on the outskirts of the '60s? By examining crucial events, trends, and individuals from the civic, social, political, intellectual, cultural, and economic spheres across a range of disciplines, this volume offers a nuanced and pluralist account of the longest decade in America.

You didn't have to be there.

LIFE Revisits the 1960s

"Reflecting on the 1960s at 50: A Concise Account of How the 1960s Changed America, for Better and for Worse is a punchy, conversational look at some of the most interesting pieces of cultural and social conflict from the '60s, reflected through the lens of our own vantage point today. This approachable, informative volume uses transcripts of public interviews to provide the viewpoints of half a dozen nationally known scholars with long records of writing in scholarly and popular realms. They represent a range of disciplinary and political perspectives from the humanities to the social sciences and from the progressive left to the conservative right. These scholars offer their thoughts on: the place of youth in American society that emerged from the '60s the lingering contributions the counterculture made to American institutions and social life the legacy in contemporary America of the struggles over racial disparities in the '60s the ways in which the revolution of sexual mores and relations of that decade have affected marriage and family today the war in Vietnam and its effects on contemporary views of America's military power and responsibility in the world the evolution of American state power and administration that was energized by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. This book will be of interest to students of American history and the history and politics of the 1960s as well as sociologists. It searches for meaning in a period that made major contributions to the shape of the American country today"--

The 1960s was not just an era of civil rights, anti-war protest, women's liberation, hippies, marijuana, and rock festivals. The untold story of the 1960s is in fact about the New Right. For young conservatives the decade was about Barry Goldwater, Ayn Rand, an important war in the fight against communism, and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). In A Generation Divided, Rebecca Klatch examines the generation that came into political consciousness during the 1960s, telling the story of both the New Right and the New Left, and including the voices of women as well as men. The result is a riveting narrative of an extraordinary decade, of how politics became central to the identities of a generation of people, and how changes in the political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s affected this identity.

A failed West Point cadet would coin the phrase "turn on, tune in, and drop out." A confused seventeen-year-old from Newark planned to be an attorney but instead let loose with a poem called "Howl." An Olympic-caliber wrestler authored One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and spent the next twenty-eight years leading a band of merry pranksters on a cross-country, electric Kool-Aid odyssey... These were a few of the men whose radical ideas were forged in the black-and-white '50s. Before the 1960s turned into a frenzy of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, before Kent State, before a battered America fled from Vietnam, a seismic Technicolor shift was underway-led by a group of visionaries who collaborated, competed, went to jail, and fought against an Establishment that fought back just as furiously. From the last days of the Beat Generation to the strange history of LSD in America, from the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the fantastic, teeming celebration at Woodstock, from the civil right movement to the anti-war protests brewing at college campuses across the country, this phenomenal book will let those who were there rediscover the magic and those who weren't discover why the '60s was the decade to beat all others.... Book jacket.

In this absorbing new book, David Farber gives us the history of our collective and individual memories of the 1960s: the brilliant colors of revolt and rapture, of flames and raised fists, of napalm and tear gas, of people desperate to make history even as others fought fiercely to stop them. More than thirty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, this book grounds our understanding of the terrible events of that era by linking them to our country's grand projects of previous decades: the forging of a national system of social provision in the New Deal; our new agenda as global superpower after World War II; the creation of the national security state; and the maturation of a national consumer-driven mass-mediated marketplace. Farber's account, based on years of research in archives and oral histories as well as in the historical literature, deals in full not only with nation building in Vietnam, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Watts riot, and the War on Poverty, but with the entertainment business, the drug culture, and much more.

The 1960s Cultural Revolution is a highly readable and valuable resource revisiting personalities and events that sparked the cultural revolutions that have become synonymous with the 1960s. The 1960s Cultural Revolution: A Reference Guide is an engagingly written book that considers the forces that shaped the 1960s and made it the unique era that it was. An introductory historical overview provides context and puts the decade in perspective. With a focus on social and cultural history, subsequent chapters focus on the New Left, the antiwar movement, the counterculture, and 1968, a year that stands alone in American history. The book also includes a wealth of reference material, a comprehensive timeline of events, biographical profiles of key players, primary documents that enhance the significance of the social, political, and cultural climate, a glossary of key terms, and a carefully selected annotated bibliography of print and nonprint sources for further study.