Aroused by gains in civil rights and galvanized by the antiwar movement, radical leaders of the 1960s sought to make revolutionary changes in American society. Partly through their leadership, a generation was awakened by the call for a counterculture. That generation is now responsible for the same social and political structures they so adamantly, and sometimes violently, opposed. How did the sixties affect the counterculture leaders? And what are they doing now? Paul Krassner, Cleveland Sellers, Jane Adams, Dave Dellinger, Bill Ayers, Warren Hinckle, Peter Berg, Noam Chomsky, Tim Leary, Philip Berrigan, Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Erica Huggins, Jim Fouratt, Bernadine Dohrn, Barry Melton, Peter Coyote, and Abbie Hoffman reflect on the seminal events that dominated the sixties and discuss the major issues and problems facing America (and them!) today.
Part history, part biography, this book describes the issues that produced the passionate activism of the 1960s and the campaigns waged at Princeton University by Students for a Democratic Society, the most important radical organization on campuses at the time. The author traces the lives of nine leaders of the Princeton SDS chapter, examining the effect of their participation in the radical movement on their career choices and subsequent political opinions. A number of these former activists are still involved in efforts to create a more egalitarian society, the same goal that motivated them half a century ago.
The first in-depth study of the long march of the US New Left after 1968 The sixties were a time when radical movements learned to embrace twentieth-century Marxism. Revolution in the Air is the definitive study of this turning point, and examines what the resistance of today can learn from the legacies of Lenin, Mao and Che. It tells the story of the “new communist movement” which was the most racially integrated and fast-growing movement on the Left. Thousands of young activists, radicalized by the Vietnam War and Black Liberation, and spurred on by the Puerto Rican, Chicano and Asian-American movements, embraced a Third World oriented version of Marxism. These admirers of Mao, Che and Amilcar Cabral organized resistance to the Republican majorities of Nixon and Ford. By the 1980s these groups had either collapsed or become tiny shards of the dream of a Maoist world revolution. Taking issue with the idea of a division between an early “good sixties” and a later “bad sixties,” Max Elbaum is particularly concerned to reclaim the lessons of the new communist movement for today’s activists who, like their sixties’ predecessors, are coming of age at a time when the Left lacks mass support and is fragmented along racial lines. With a new foreward by Alicia Garza, cofounder of #BlackLivesMatter.
The Weathermen. The Symbionese Liberation Army. The FALN. The Black Liberation Army. The names seem quaint now, but there was a stretch of time in America when there was on average more than one significant terrorist act in the U.S. every week. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government. Thus began a decade-long battle between the FBI and these homegrown terrorists, compellingly and thrillingly documented in Days of Rage.
Debating the 1960s explores the decade through the controversies between radicals, liberals, and conservatives. The focus is on four main areas of contention: social welfare, civil rights, foreign relations, and social order. The book also examines the emergence of the New Left and the modern conservative movement. Combining analytical essays and historical documents, the book highlights the polarization of the era and assesses the enduring importance of the 1960s on contemporary American politics and society.
What caused the New Left rebellion of the 1960s? In Smoking Typewriters, historian John McMillian argues that the "underground press" contributed to the New Left's growth and cultural organization in crucial, overlooked ways.
A chronicle of a friendship that began in 1969 and spanned three decades. Two high school newspaper editors in different states exchanges heated letters about politics, relationships and social upheaval and spark a friendship that lasted through heartbreak and change.
Restricted to the shorthand of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” the counterculture would seem to be a brief, vibrant stretch of the 1960s. But the American counterculture, as this book clearly demonstrates, was far more than a historical blip and its impact continues to resonate. In this comprehensive history, Damon R. Bach traces the counterculture from its antecedents in the 1950s through its emergence and massive expansion in the 1960s to its demise in the 1970s and persistent echoes in the decades since. The counterculture, as Bach tells it, evolved in discrete stages and his book describes its development from coast to heartland to coast as it evolved into a national phenomenon, involving a diverse array of participants and undergoing fundamental changes between 1965 and 1974. Hippiedom appears here in relationship to the era’s movements—civil rights, women’s and gay liberation, Red and Black Power, the New Left, and environmentalism. In its connection to other forces of the time, Bach contends that the counterculture’s central objective was to create a new, superior society based on alternative values and institutions. Drawing for the first time on documents produced by self-described “freaks” from 1964 through 1973—underground newspapers, memoirs, personal correspondence, flyers, and pamphlets—his book creates an unusually nuanced, colorful, and complete picture of a time often portrayed in clichéd or nostalgic terms. This is the counterculture of love-ins and flower children, of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, but also of antiwar demonstrations, communes, co-ops, head shops, cultural feminism, Earth Day, and antinuclear activism. What Damon R. Bach conjures is the counterculture in all of its permutations and ramifications as he illuminates its complexity, continually evolving values, and constantly changing components and adherents, which defined and redefined it throughout its near decade-long existence. In the long run, Bach convincingly argues that the counterculture spearheaded cultural transformation, leaving a changed America in its wake.
"Prairie Radical is the memoir of a young man whose life was radically changed when he joined the civil rights movement and spoke out against the war in Vietnam. It is an inside history of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest student organization of the 1960s as seen by one of its national officers who spent 1967-68 in the SDS national office at the height of the antiwar movement. It is also the history of the vibrant and innovative SDS chapter at the University of Texas in Austin, one of the Prairie Power strongholds, where the cultural rebellion and the political movement were united. Robert Pardun's story is set within the context of what was happening in Vietnam and interwoven with what we now know was happening inside the government and the FBI."--Jacket.
'Sixties Radicalism and Social Movement Activism' explores and re-analyses major events, debates and themes from the radical developments of the nineteen sixties and relates them to contemporary social movements and issues.
