The Spirit of the Sixties explains how and why the personal became political when Sixties activists confronted the institutions of American postwar culture. The Spirit of the Sixties uses political personalism to explain how and why the personal became political when Sixties activists confronted the institutions of American postwar culture. After establishing its origins in the Catholic Worker movement, the Beat generation, the civil rights movement, and Ban-the-Bomb protests, James Farrell demonstrates the impact of personalism on Sixties radicalism. Students, antiwar activists and counterculturalists all used personalist perspectives in the "here and now revolution" of the decade. These perspectives also persisted in American politics after the Sixties. Exploring the Sixties not just as history but as current affairs, Farrell revisits the perennial questions of human purpose and cultural practice contested in the decade.
Unveils the spiritual meaning that fueled the artistic, political, and social revolutions of the 1960s • Investigates the spiritual principles that informed everything from the civil rights and anti-war movements, to the hippies’ rejection of materialist culture, to the rise of feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism • Reveals how medieval troubadours, Gnosticism, Renaissance hermetic magic, and the occult doctrines of Aleister Crowley helped shape the psychedelic Sixties • Offers in-depth analysis of many of the era’s most famous books, films, and music No decade in modern history has generated more controversy and divisiveness than the tumultuous 1960s. For some, the ‘60s were an era of free love, drugs, and social revolution. For others, the Sixties were an ungodly rejection of all that was good and holy. Embarking on a profound search for the spiritual meaning behind the massive social upheavals of the 1960s, Tobias Churton turns a kaleidoscopic lens on religious and esoteric history, industry, science, philosophy, art, and social revolution to identify the meaning behind all these diverse movements. Engaging with views of mainstream historians, some of whom write off this pivotal decade as heralding an overall decline in moral values and respect for tradition, Churton examines the intricate network of spiritual forces at play in the era. He reveals spiritual principles that united the free love movement, the civil rights and anti-war movements, the hippies’ rejection of materialist culture, and the eventual rise of feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism. He traces influences from medieval troubadours, Gnosticism, Hindu philosophy, Renaissance hermetic magic, and the occult doctrines of Aleister Crowley. He also examines the psychedelic revolution, the genesis of popular interest in UFOs, and the psychological consequences of the Bomb and the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. In addition, Churton investigates the huge shifts in consciousness reflected in the movies, music, art, and literature of the era--from Frank Sinatra to the Beatles, from I Love Lucy to Star Trek, from John Wayne to Midnight Cowboy--much of which still resonates with the youth of today. Taking the reader on a long strange trip from crew-cuts and Bermuda shorts to Hair and Woodstock, from liquor to psychedelics, from uncool to cool, and from matter to Soul, Churton shows how the spiritual values of the Sixties are now reemerging, with an astonishing influx of spiritual light, to once again awaken us.
Introduction -- The conscience problem and Catholic doctrine -- Political origins : totalitarianism, world war, and mass conscription -- The State's paperwork and the Catholic Peace Fellowship -- Sex, conscience and the American Catholic Church 1968 -- Psychology and the self -- The conscience lobby -- Beyond the Catholic Church.
This paradigm-breaking book dares to rethink the whole of the '60s experience, not from a political or sociological viewpoint but from an historical/theological perspective. Camille Paglia wrote that 'the spiritual history of the sixties has yet to be written.' This is that book. The book's chapters each correspond to a line in Emily Dickinson's poem 'Finding is the first act.' The parallel to Dickinson's experience in the psychic wilderness demonstrates just how much the experience of the '60s was part of an ongoing American story not an aberration. Though it seems contradictory, this book argues for an appreciation of the three '60s: 1960s, 1860s, 1660s, each a chapter of the religious core of the American story.
Promise of a Dream is a moving, witty and poignant recollection of a time when young women were breaking all the rules about sex, politics and their place in the world. Sheila Rowbotham, best known for A Century of Women, Threads Through Time and Hidden From History, turns her hand here to memoir. The result is a wryly amusing account of her younger self, and a sparkling portrait of the exhilaration and enthusiasm of the sixties.
The development of the modern Yale Law School is deeply intertwined with the story of a group of students in the 1960s who worked to unlock democratic visions of law and social change that they associated with Yale's past and with the social climate in which they lived. During a charged moment in the history of the United States, activists challenged senior professors, and the resulting clash pitted young against old in a very human story. By demanding changes in admissions, curriculum, grading, and law practice, Laura Kalman argues, these students transformed Yale Law School and the future of American legal education. Inspired by Yale's legal realists of the 1930s, Yale law students between 1967 and 1970 spawned a movement that celebrated participatory democracy, black power, feminism, and the counterculture. After these students left, the repercussions hobbled the school for years. Senior law professors decided against retaining six junior scholars who had witnessed their conflict with the students in the early 1970s, shifted the school's academic focus from sociology to economics, and steered clear of critical legal studies. Ironically, explains Kalman, students of the 1960s helped to create a culture of timidity until an imaginative dean in the 1980s tapped into and domesticated the spirit of the sixties, helping to make Yale's current celebrity possible.
For many people, the '60s were a period of reawakening. The political and cultural upheavals of the time had a tremendous effect on the spiritual lives of Americans, and American religion in its various forms and incarnations has not been the same since. Ellwood pulls together the changes that occurred in organized and disorganized religions during this turbulent decade.
In 1959, Richard Bellamy was a witty, poetry-loving beatnik on the fringe of the New York art world who was drawn to artists impatient for change. By 1965, he was representing Mark di Suvero, was the first to show Andy Warhol’s pop art, and pioneered the practice of “off-site” exhibitions and introduced the new genre of installation art. As a dealer, he helped discover and champion many of the innovative successors to the abstract expressionists, including Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Walter De Maria, and many others. The founder and director of the fabled Green Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, Bellamy thrived on the energy of the sixties. With the covert support of America’s first celebrity art collectors, Robert and Ethel Scull, Bellamy gained his footing just as pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art were taking hold and the art world was becoming a playground for millionaires. Yet as an eccentric impresario dogged by alcohol and uninterested in profits or posterity, Bellamy rarely did more than show the work he loved. As fellow dealers such as Leo Castelli and Sidney Janis capitalized on the stars he helped find, Bellamy slowly slid into obscurity, becoming the quiet man in oversize glasses in the corner of the room, a knowing and mischievous smile on his face. Born to an American father and a Chinese mother in a Cincinnati suburb, Bellamy moved to New York in his twenties and made a life for himself between the Beat orbits of Provincetown and white-glove events like the Guggenheim’s opening gala. No matter the scene, he was always considered “one of us,” partying with Norman Mailer, befriending Diane Arbus and Yoko Ono, and hosting or performing in historic Happenings. From his early days at the Hansa Gallery to his time at the Green to his later life as a private dealer, Bellamy had his finger on the pulse of the culture. Based on decades of research and on hundreds of interviews with Bellamy’s artists, friends, colleagues, and lovers, Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties rescues the legacy of the elusive art dealer and tells the story of a counterculture that became the mainstream. A tale of money, taste, loyalty, and luck, Richard Bellamy’s life is a remarkable window into the art of the twentieth century and the making of a generation’s aesthetic. -- "Bellamy had an understanding of art and a very fine sense of discovery. There was nobody like him, I think. I certainly consider myself his pupil." --Leo Castelli
ÒIf you remember the Sixties,Ó quipped Robin Williams, Òyou werenÕt there.Ó That was, of course, an oblique reference to the mind-bending drugs that clouded perceptionÑyet time has proven an equally effective hallucinogen. This book revisits the Sixties we forgot or somehow failed to witness. In a kaleidoscopic global tour of the decade, Gerard DeGroot reminds us that the ÒBallad of the Green BeretÓ outsold ÒGive Peace a Chance,Ó that the Students for a Democratic Society were outnumbered by Young Americans for Freedom, that revolution was always a pipe dream, and that the Sixties belong to Reagan and de Gaulle more than to Kennedy and Dubcek. The Sixties Unplugged shows how opportunity was squandered, and why nostalgia for the decade has obscured sordidness and futility. DeGroot returns us to a time in which idealism, tolerance, and creativity gave way to cynicism, chauvinism, and materialism. He presents the Sixties as a drama acted out on stages around the world, a theater of the absurd in which ChinaÕs Cultural Revolution proved to be the worst atrocity of the twentieth century, the Six-Day War a disaster for every nation in the Middle East, and a million slaughtered Indonesians martyrs to greed. The Sixties Unplugged restores to an era the prevalent disorder and inconvenient truths that longing, wistfulness, and distance have obscured. In an impressionistic journey through a tumultuous decade, DeGroot offers an object lesson in the distortions nostalgia can create as it strives to impose order on memory and value on mayhem.
Relive one of the most magical times in history, a time that saw profound cultural and spiritual change throughout the world, but nowhere more than in the San Francisco Bay of the mid to late 1960's. Author and photographer Gene Anthony was there, capturing every moment, every poem, every song, and every embrace on film. This photographic tour gets you up close and personal with musicians like Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. It takes you inside the volatile demonstrations at the heart of the anti-war movement, the women's rights movement, the struggle for civil rights. From the Fillmore, to the Human Be-in, to the Trips Festival, Anthony has created a collection of work that captures the feeling of these once in a lifetime events. With over 300 personal and passionate photographs, this book is a visual tour through the freedom, hopes, and beliefs that defined an era and changed the world.
