In The Sixties

Contains alphabetically arranged entries that survey the events and people of the 1960s, discussing their impact on the life and culture of the United States.

Love, poetry, protest, the Beatles, psychedelia and the 1960s underground in pictures, words and rare sound recordings form this illustrated memoir by one of the key figures of the Sixties British counterculture.

Ideologically divided and disorganized in 1960, the conservative wing of the Republican Party appeared to many to be virtually obsolete. However, over the course of that decade, the Right reinvented itself and gained control of the party. In Turning Right in the Sixties, Mary Brennan describes how conservative Americans from a variety of backgrounds, feeling disfranchised and ignored, joined forces to make their voices heard and by 1968 had gained enough power within the party to play the decisive role in determining the presidential nominee. Building on Barry Goldwater's short-lived bid for the presidential nomination in 1960, Republican conservatives forged new coalitions, began to organize at the grassroots level, and gained enough support to guarantee Goldwater the nomination in 1964. Brennan argues that Goldwater's loss to Lyndon Johnson in the general election has obscured the more significant fact that conservatives had wrested control of the Republican Party from the moderates who had dominated it for years. The lessons conservatives learned in that campaign, she says, aided them in 1968 and laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan's presidential victory in 1980.

In America in the Sixties, Greene goes beyond the clichés and synthesizes thirty years of research, writing, and teaching on one of the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century. Greene sketches the well-known players of the period—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Betty Friedan—bringing each to life with subtle detail. He introduces the reader to lesser-known incidents of the decade and offers fresh and persuasive insights on many of its watershed events. Combining an engrossing narrative with intelligent analysis, America in the Sixties enriches our understanding of that pivotal era.

The Sixties is a stimulating account of a turbulent age in America. Terry Anderson examines why the nation experienced a full decade of tumult and change, and he explores why most Americans felt social, political and cultural changes were not only necessary but mandatory in the 1960s. The book examines the dramatic era chronologically and thematically and demonstrates that what made the era so unique were the various social "movements" that eventually merged with the counterculture to form a "sixties culture," the legacies of which are still felt today. The new edition has added more material on women and the GLBTQ community, as well as on Hispanic or Latino/a community, the fastest-growing minority in the United States.

Many books have been written on the Sixties: tributes to music and fashion, sex, drugs and revolution. In The Sixties, Jenny Diski breaks the mould, wryly dismantling the big ideas that dominated the era - liberation, permissiveness and self-invention - to consider what she and her generation were really up to. Was it rude to refuse to have sex with someone? Did they take drugs to get by, or to see the world differently? How responsible were they for the self-interest and greed of the Eighties? With characteristic wit and verve, Diski takes an incisive look at the radical beliefs to which her generation subscribed, little realising they were often old ideas dressed up in new forms, sometimes patterned by BIBA. She considers whether she and her peers were as serious as they thought about changing the world, if the radical sixties were funded by the baby-boomers' parents, and if the big idea shaping the Sixties was that it really felt as if it meant something to be young.

This collection of original essays represents some of the most exciting ways in which historians are beginning to paint the 1960s onto the larger canvas of American history. While the first literature about this turbulent period was written largely by participants, many of the contributors to this volume are young scholars who came of age intellectually in the 1970s and 1980s and thus write from fresh perspectives. The essayists ask fundamental questions about how much America really changed in the 1960s and why certain changes took place. In separate chapters, they explore how the great issues of the decade--the war in Vietnam, race relations, youth culture, the status of women, the public role of private enterprise--were shaped by evolutions in the nature of cultural authority and political legitimacy. They argue that the whirlwind of events and problems we call the Sixties can only be understood in the context of the larger history of post-World War II America. Contents "Growth Liberalism in the Sixties: Great Societies at Home and Grand Designs Abroad," by Robert M. Collins "The American State and the Vietnam War: A Genealogy of Power," by Mary Sheila McMahon "And That's the Way It Was: The Vietnam War on the Network Nightly News," by Chester J. Pach, Jr. "Race, Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy," by David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta "Nothing Distant about It: Women's Liberation and Sixties Radicalism," by Alice Echols "The New American Revolution: The Movement and Business," by Terry H. Anderson "Who'll Stop the Rain?: Youth Culture, Rock 'n' Roll, and Social Crises," by George Lipsitz "Sexual Revolution(s)," by Beth Bailey "The Politics of Civility," by Kenneth Cmiel "The Silent Majority and Talk about Revolution," by David Farber

Those who didn't live through the Sixties wonder what the fuss was all about, while many of those who were there have wrestled with how to describe and define the period. While the ultimate meaning of the Sixties remains elusive, there is no doubt that they had an immense effect on Canadians - culturally, politically, and economically. The Sixties takes a multidisciplinary approach that includes history, architecture, art, political science, and journalism. Contributors examine a range of eclectic issues - from the intersection of Joyce Wieland's artwork with Pierre Trudeau's nationalism, to the debate over the changing skylines of Toronto and Montreal, to de Gaulle's famous 1967 "Vive le Québec libre!" speech - to provide a distinctly Canadian perspective on one of the liveliest and most debated periods in modern history. Four decades after Canada's own Expo 67 "summer of love," this timely book conjures up the images, sounds, and tastes of a decade that remains an indelible part of our twenty-first century experience. Contributors include Gretta Chambers (McGill), Christopher Dummitt (Trent), Olivier Courteaux (Ryerson), Frances Early (Mount Saint Vincent), Kristy Holmes (Queen's), Marcel Martel (York), Nicholas Olsberg (Canadian Centre for Architecture), Francine Vanlaethem (UQAM), and Krys Verrall (York)."