This is a course on the long sixties – an era that stretches from 1954 to 1980. It was during this period that the United States that we live in today was born: Our economy moved into its current post-industrial phase. Our society began to earnestly work toward social and cultural equality for all Americans even as the mechanisms that protected economic equality began to collapse. American global hegemony broke down in Southeast Asia. Our politics, in many cases driven by cultural divisions, divided into the polarized camps that define our contemporary political culture. The mass media where so many of these battles were fought was born. We will approach this amazingly contentious and intellectually invigorating era as historians interested in learning about the events, personalities, and social, political, economic, and cultural shifts that defined the time period. We will focus much of our attention on many of the newer forms of media and the contemporary observations of the nation’s public intellectuals, artists, and activists.
