Student Movements Of The 1960s

This fascinating volume explores the historical and cultural events leading up to and following the student movements of the 1960s. Readers will learn about issues surrounding the goals of the activists, black power, feminism, and the role of drugs and music. This book also includes personal narratives from people who experienced the student movements of the 1960s. Essay sources include Lyndon B. Johnson, Kathie Sarachild, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Personal narratives include a girl's experience of feminism in the sixties, and Mario Savio's tense words about the California students who were facing trial.

This topical new study takes a new look at the causes, course and consequences of student activism across the world since its heyday in the 1960s. It starts with analyses of some of the most familiar - and romanticised - Sixties protests themselves, in the US, France, Germany, Mexico and Great Britain. It then goes on to examine more recent, and hazardous, examples of student activism, particularly in China, Korea and Iran. Throughout, the tone is hard-headed and analytical, rather than celebratory, exploring the similarities and differences across these protests and asking what they achieved. The contributors to the volume are: Ingo Cornils; Gerard J. DeGroot; Sylvia Ellis; Sandra Hollin Flowers; Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi; Bertram M. Gordon; J. Angus Johnston; Alan R. Kluver; Donald J. Mabry; Gunter Minnerup; A.D. Moses; Frank Pieke; Julie Reuben; Barbara Tischler; Nella Van Dyke; Clare White; James L. Wood; Eric Zolov.

While this book is a history of the student activism of the sixties, its mode of analysis goes beyond the essential facts and events, probing underlying causes that are not peculiar to this particular unrest alone but are endemic to the rise and development of such movements in general.

SynnottJeffrey A. TurnerErica WhittingtonJoy Ann Williamson-Lott

In the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the historic sit-in at Woolworth's lunch counter by four North Carolina A&T college students, From Sit-Ins to SNCC brings together the work of leading civil rights scholars to offer a new and groundbreaking perspective on student-oriented activism in the 1960s. The eight substantive essays in this collection not only delineate the role of SNCC over the course of the struggle for African American civil rights but also offer an updated perspective on the development and impact of the sit-in movement in light of newly released papers from the estate of Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI, and MI-5. The contributors provide novel analyses of such topics as the dynamics of grassroots student civil rights activism, the organizational and cultural changes within SNCC, the impact of the sit-ins on the white South, the evolution of black nationalist ideology within the student movement, works of the fiction written by movement activists, and the changing international outlook of student-organized civil rights movements.

In 1969, the campus tumult that defined the Sixties reached a flash point at the University of Illinois. Out-of-town radicals preached armed revolution. Students took to the streets and fought police and National Guardsmen. Firebombs were planted in lecture halls while explosions rocked a federal building on one side of town and a recruiting office on the other. Across the state, the powers-that-be expressed shock that such events could take place at Illinois's esteemed, conservative, flagship university—how could it happen here, of all places? Positioning the events in the context of their time, Michael V. Metz delves into the lives and actions of activists at the center of the drama. A participant himself, Metz draws on interviews, archives, and newspaper records to show a movement born in demands for free speech, inspired by a movement for civil rights, and driven to the edge by a seemingly never-ending war. If the sudden burst of irrational violence baffled parents, administrators, and legislators, it seemed inevitable to students after years of official intransigence and disregard. Metz portrays campus protesters not as angry, militant extremists but as youthful citizens deeply engaged with grave moral issues, embodying the idealism, naiveté, and courage of a minority of a generation.

Based on empirical evidence derived from university and national archives across the country and interviews with participants, British Student Activism in the Long Sixtiesreconstructs the world of university students in the 1960s and 1970s. Student accounts are placed within the context of a wide variety of primary and secondary sources from across Britain and the world, making this project the first book-length history of the British student movement to employ literary and theoretical frameworks which differentiate it from most other histories of student activism to date. Globalization, especially of mass communications, made British students aware of global problems such as the threat of nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, racism, sexism and injustice. British students applied these global ideas to their own unique circumstances, using their intellectual traditions and political theories which resulted in unique outcomes. British student activists effectively gained support from students, staff, and workers for their struggle for student’s rights to unionize, freely assemble and speak, and participate in university decision-making. Their campaigns effectively raised public awareness of these issues and contributed to significant national decisions in many considerable areas.

Using previously classified documents and original interviews, The Other Alliance examines the channels of cooperation between American and West German student movements throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and the reactions these relationships provoked from the U.S. government. Revising the standard narratives of American and West German social mobilization, Martin Klimke demonstrates the strong transnational connections between New Left groups on both sides of the Atlantic. Klimke shows that the cold war partnership of the American and German governments was mirrored by a coalition of rebelling counterelites, whose common political origins and opposition to the Vietnam War played a vital role in generating dissent in the United States and Europe. American protest techniques such as the "sit-in" or "teach-in" became crucial components of the main organization driving student activism in West Germany--the German Socialist Student League--and motivated American and German student activists to construct networks against global imperialism. Klimke traces the impact that Black Power and Germany's unresolved National Socialist past had on the German student movement; he investigates how U.S. government agencies, such as the State Department's Interagency Youth Committee, advised American policymakers on confrontations with student unrest abroad; and he highlights the challenges student protesters posed to cold war alliances. Exploring the catalysts of cross-pollination between student protest movements on two continents, The Other Alliance is a pioneering work of transnational history.