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The 1960s decade refers to the years from the beginning of 1960 to the end of 1969.The term also refers to an era more often called The Sixties, denoting the complex of inter-related cultural and political trends which occurred roughly during the years 1956–1974 in the west, particularly United States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Spain, Italy, and West Germany. Social and political upheaval was not limited to these countries, but included such nations as Japan, Mexico, and others. In the United States, The Sixties as they are known in popular culture today lasted from about 1963 to 1973. The term is used descriptively by historians, journalists, and other objective academics; nostalgically by those who participated in the counter-culture and social revolution; and pejoratively by those who perceive the era as one of irresponsible excess and flamboyance.
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The 1960s decade refers to the years from the beginning of 1960 to the end of 1969.The term also refers to an era more often called The Sixties, denoting the complex of inter-related cultural and political trends which occurred roughly during the years 1956–1974 in the west, particularly United States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Spain, Italy, and West Germany. Social and political upheaval was not limited to these countries, but included such nations as Japan, Mexico, and others. In the United States, The Sixties as they are known in popular culture today lasted from about 1963 to 1973. The term is used descriptively by historians, journalists, and other objective academics; nostalgically by those who participated in the counter-culture and social revolution; and pejoratively by those who perceive the era as one of irresponsible excess and flamboyance. The decade was also labeled the Swinging Sixties because of the libertine attitudes that emerged during this decade. Rampant drug use has become inextricably associated with the counter-culture of the era, as Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner mentions: "If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren't really there."
The 1960s have become synonymous with all the new, exciting, radical, and subversive events and trends of the period, which continued to develop in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and beyond. In Africa the 1960s was a period of radical political change as countries gained independence from their European colonial rulers, only for this rule to be replaced in many cases by civil war or corrupt dictatorships.
Some commentators have seen in this era a classical Jungian nightmare cycle as a rigid culture, unable to contain the demands for greater individual freedom, broke free of the social constraints of the previous age through extreme deviation from the norm. Booker charts the rise, success, fall/nightmare and explosion in the London scene of the 1960s. This does not alone however explain the mass nature of the phenomenon.
Several Western governments turned to the left in the early 1960s. In the United States President John F. Kennedy was elected as president. Italy formed its first left-of-centre government in March 1962 with a coalition of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, and moderate Republicans. Socialists joined the ruling block in December 1963. In Britain, the Labour Party gained power in 1964.
Assassinations
The 1960s were marked by several notable assassinations.
- The Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated by Belgian/Congolese firing squad on January 17, 1961.
- Medgar Evers, a NAACP field secretary, was assassinated by a Ku Klux Klan member on June 12, 1963.
- Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem (Ngô Ðình Di?m) was assassinated in the back of an APC November 2, 1963.
- US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 in his car during a parade, JFK assassination for more details.
- Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965
- Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
- Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 6, 1968.
- Social activist and deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Fred Hampton, was assassinated in December, 1969.
Social and political movements
Counterculture/social revolution
Younger generations soon began to rebel against the conservative norms of the time, as well as disassociate themselves from mainstream liberalism, in particular they turned away from the high levels of materialism which was so common during the era. This created a counter-culture that eventually turned into a social revolution throughout much of the western world. It began in the United States as a reaction against the conservative social norms and stasis of the 1950s, the political conservatism (and social repression) of the Cold War period, and the US government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam. The more social/cultural youth from the movement were called hippies. Together they created a new liberated stance for society, including the sexual revolution, questioning authority and government, and demanding more freedoms and rights for women, homosexuals, and minorities. The Underground Press, a wide-spread, eclectic collection of underground newspapers served as a unifying factor for the counterculture. The movement was marked by drug use (including LSD and marijuana) and psychedelic music.
Anti-war movementA mass movement began rising in opposition to the Vietnam War, ending in the massive Moratorium protests in 1969, and also the movement of resistance to conscription (“the Draft”) for the war. The antiwar movement was initially based on the older 1950s Peace movement heavily influenced by the American Communist Party, but by the mid-1960s it outgrew this and became a broad-based mass movement centered on the universities and churches: one kind of protest was called a "sit-in." Other terms heard nationally included the Draft, draft dodger, conscientious objector, and Vietnam vet. Voter age-limits were challenged by the phrase: "If you're old enough to die for your country, you're old enough to vote." Many of the youth involved in the politics of the movements distanced themselves from the "hippies".
The most well-known anti-war demonstration was the Kent State shootings. In 1970, university students were protesting the war and the draft. Riots ensued during the weekend and the National Guard was called into maintain the peace. However, by Monday, tensions arose again, and as the crowd grew larger, the National Guard started shooting. Four students were dead and nine injured. This event caused disbelief and shock throughout the country and became a staple of anti-Vietnam demonstrations.
Civil rightsMuch of the political movements and the people participating in them came from the civil rights struggle in the south in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Blacks began to challenge segregation in the south through various means, such as, boycotts, freedom rides, sit-ins, law suits and registering blacks to vote. Stimulated by this movement, but growing beyond it, were large numbers of student-age youth, beginning with the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, peaking in the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and reaching a climax with the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, which some claimed as proof that "police brutality" was rampant. The terms were: "The Establishment" referring to traditional management/government, and "pigs" referring to police using excessive force.
Chicano MovementSocially, the Chicano Movement addressed what it perceived to be negative ethnic stereotype of Mexicans in mass media and the American consciousness. It did so through the creation of works of literary and visual art that validated the Mexican-American ethnicity and culture.
The Chicano Movement also addressed discrimination in public and private institutions. Early in the twentieth century, Mexican Americans formed organizations to protect themselves from discrimination. One of those organizations, the League of United Latin American Citizens, was formed in 1929 and remains active today.
The movement gained momentum after World War II when groups such as the American G.I. Forum, which was formed by returning Mexican American veterans, joined in the efforts by other civil rights organizations.
Mexican American civil rights activists achieved several major legal victories including the 1947 Mendez v. Westminster Supreme Court ruling which declared that segregating children of "Mexican and Latin descent" was unconstitutional and the 1954 Hernandez v. Texas ruling which declared that Mexican Americans and other racial groups in the United States were entitled to equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The most prominent civil rights organization in the Mexican-American community is the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), founded in 1968. Although modeled after the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, MALDEF has also taken on many of the functions of other organizations, including political advocacy and training of local leaders.
New LeftThe rapid rise of a "New Left" applied the class perspective of Marxism to postwar America, but had little organizational connection with older Marxist organizations such as the Communist Party, and even went as far as to reject organized labor as the basis of a unified left-wing movement. The New Left differed from the traditional left in its resistance to dogma and its emphasis on personal as well as societal change. SDS|Students for a Democratic Society]]) became the organizational focus of the New Left and was the prime mover behind the opposition to the War in Vietnam. The sixties left also consisted of ephemeral campus-based Trotskyist, Maoist and anarchist groups, some of which by the end of the 1960s had turned to militancy.
TechnologyThe Soviet Union and the United States were involved in the space race. This led to an increase in spending on science and technology during this period. The space race heated up when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth and President Kennedy announced Project Apollo in 1961. The Soviets and Americans were then involved in a race to put a man on the Moon before the decade was over. America won the race when it placed the first men on the Moon: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, in July 1969.
American automobiles evolved through the stream-lined, jet-inspired designs for sports cars such as the Pontiac GTO and the Plymouth Barracuda, Ford Mustang, and the Chevrolet Corvette.
- 1960 - The female birth control contraceptive, the pill, was released
- 1960 - The first working laser was demonstrated in May by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories.
- 1961 - First human spaceflight to orbit the Earth: Yuri Gagarin, Vostok 1.
- 1962 - First trans-Atlantic satellite broadcast via the Telstar satellite.
- 1962 - The first computer video game, Spacewar!, is invented.
- 1963 - The first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom 2 is launched.
- 1963 - Touch-Tone telephones introduced.
- 1964 - The first successful Minicomputer, Digital Equipment Corporation’s 12-bit PDP-8, is marketed.
- 1964 - The programming language BASIC was created.
- 1965 - Sony markets the CV-2000, the first home video tape recorder.
- 1966 - The Soviet Union launches Luna 10, which later becomes the first space probe to enter orbit around the Moon.
- 1967 - First heart transplantation operation.
- 1967 - PAL and SECAM broadcast color TV systems start publicly transmitting in Europe.
- 1967 - The first minibank is opened in Barclays Bank, London.
- 1968 - First humans to leave Earth's gravity influence and orbit another world: Apollo 8.
- 1968 - The first public demonstration of the computer mouse, the paper paradigm Graphical user interface, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, and hypertext.
- 1969 - Arpanet, the research-oriented prototype of the Internet, was introduced.
- 1969 - First humans to walk on the Moon: Apollo 11.
- 1969 - CCD invented at AT&T Bell Labs, used as the electronic imager in still and video cameras.
Popular cultureThe overlapping, but somewhat different, movement of youth cultural radicalism was manifested by the hippies and the counter-culture, whose emblematic moments were the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967 and the Woodstock Festival in 1969. The sub-culture, associated with this movement, spread the recreational use of cannabis and other drugs, particularly new semi-synthetic drugs such as LSD. The era heralded the rejection and a reformation by hippies of traditional Christian notions on spirituality, leading to the widespread introduction of Eastern and ethnic religious thinking to western values and concepts concerning one's religious and spiritual development.
Psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, were popularly used medicinally, spiritually and recreationally throughout the 1960s. Psychedelic influenced the music, artwork and movies of the decade.
MusicPopular music entered an era of "all hits", as numerous artists released recordings, beginning in the 1950s, as 45-rpm "singles" (with another on the flip side), and radio stations tended to play only the most popular of the wide variety of records being made. Also, bands tended to record only the best of their songs as a chance to become a hit record. The developments of the Motown Sound, "folk rock" and the British Invasion of bands from the U.K., are major examples of American listeners expanding from the folksinger, doo-wop and saxophone sounds of the 1950s and evolving to include psychedelic music.
The rise of the counterculture, particularly among the youth, created a huge market for rock, soul, pop and blues music produced by drug-culture, influenced bands such as The Beatles, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix Experience, and The Incredible String Band, also for radical music in the folk tradition pioneered by Bob Dylan, The Mamas and the Papas, and Joan Baez in the United States, and in England, Donovan was helping to create folk rock.
Significant events in music in the 1960s:
- Motown Record Corporation founded in 1960. Its first Top Ten hit was "Shop Around" by the Miracles in 1960. "Shop Around" peaked at number-two on the Billboard Hot 100, and was Motown's first million-selling record.
- The Marvelettes scored Motown Record Corporation's first US #1 pop hit, "Please Mr. Postman" in 1961. Motown would score 110 Billboard Top-Ten hits during its run.
- The Seekers are the first Australian Group to have a number one with "Georgy Girl" in 1966.
- The Four Seasons released 4 straight number 1s
- The Beatles went to America in 1964, spearheading the first British Invasion.
- The Supremes scored twelve number one hit singles between 1964 and 1969, beginning with Where Did Our Love Go.
- Bob Dylan goes electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
- The Beach Boys release Pet Sounds in 1966, ushering in the era of album-orientated rock.
- Bob Dylan is called "Judas" by an audience member during the legendary Manchester Free Trade Hall concert, the start of the Bootleg recording industry follows, with recordings of this concert circulating for 30 years – wrongly labeled as – The Royal Albert Hall Concert before a legitimate release in 1998 as .
- In February 1966, Nancy Sinatra's song "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" became very popular.
- In 1966, The Supremes A' Go-Go was the first album by a female group to reach the top position of the Billboard magazine pop albums chart in the United States.
- Jefferson Airplane release the influential Surrealistic Pillow in 1967.
- The Velvet Underground release their influential self-titled debut albumThe Velvet Underground and Nico in 1967.
- The Doors release their self-tilted debut album The Doors.
- Love release their masterpiece Forever Changes in 1967.
- The Jimi Hendrix Experience release two successful albums during 1967 Are You Experienced and that innovate both guitar, trio and recording techniques.
- The Beatles release the seminal concept album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in June 1967.
- The Moody Blues release the album Days of Future Passed in November 1967.
- Pink Floyd releases their debut record The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
- Bob Dylan releases the Country Rock album John Wesley Harding in December 1967.
- The Bee Gees release their international debut album Bee Gees 1st in July, 1967 which contains the pop standard To Love Somebody.
- The Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 was the apex of the so-called "Summer of Love".
- Johnny Cash releases At Folsom Prison in 1968
- After The Yardbirds had folded, Jimmy Page and manager Peter Grant, met with Robert Plant and they together with John Bonham and John Paul Jones called themselves Led Zeppelin and released their début album Led Zeppelin.
- The Band releases the roots rock album Music from Big Pink in 1968.
- Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin as lead singer, becomes an overnight sensation after their performance at Monterey Pop in 1967 and release their massively successful second album Cheap Thrills in 1968.
- The Jimi Hendrix Experience release the highly influential double LP Electric Ladyland in 1968 that furthered the guitar and studio innovations of the previous two albums.
- Sly and the Family Stone revolutionize black music with their massive 1968 hit single Dance to the Music and by 1969 became international sensations with the release of their phenomenal hit record Stand!. The band cemented their position as a vital counterculture band when they performed at the Woodstock Festival.
- The Rolling Stones film the TV special Rock and Roll Circus in December 1968 which was never broadcast during its contemporary time. Considered for decades as a fabled 'lost' performance until released in North America on Laserdisc and VHS in 1995. Features performances from The Who; The Dirty Mac featuring John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Mitch Mitchell; Jethro Tull and Taj Mahal.
- The Who release and tour the first rock opera Tommy in 1969.
- Proto-punk band MC5 release the live album Kick Out The Jams in 1969.
- Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band release the avant garde Trout Mask Replica in 1969.
- The Stooges release their debut album in 1969.
- The Flying Burrito Brothers release their influential debut The Gilded Palace Of Sin in 1969.
- The Woodstock Festival, and four months later, the Altamont Free Concert in 1969.
FilmPopular American movies of the 1960s include Psycho, Breakfast at Tiffany's, To Kill a Mockingbird, My Fair Lady, The Pink Panther, ; The Sound of Music; Doctor Zhivago, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Bonnie and Clyde; Cool Hand Luke; The Graduate; Rosemary's Baby; Midnight Cowboy; Head; Medium Cool; ; Easy Rider.
The Counterculture Revolution had a big effect on cinema. Movies began to break social taboos such as sex and violence causing both controversy and fascination. They turned increasingly dramatic, unbalanced, and hectic as the cultural revolution was starting. This was the beginning of the New Hollywood era that dominated the next decade in theatres and revolutionized the movie industry. Films such as Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Stanley Kubrick's (1968), and Roman Polanski | |
