The following is a timeline of 1960s counterculture . Influential events and milestones years before and after the 1960s are included for context relevant to the subject period of the early 1960s through the mid-1970s.
John Winston Ono Lennon was an English singer-songwriter, musician and political activist. He gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His work included music, writing, drawings and film. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history as the primary songwriters in the Beatles.
Psychedelic rock is a rock music genre that is inspired, influenced, or representative of psychedelic culture, which is centered on perception-altering hallucinogenic drugs. The music incorporated new electronic sound effects and recording techniques, extended instrumental solos, and improvisation. Many psychedelic groups differ in style, and the label is often applied spuriously.
The Summer of Love was a major social phenomenon that occurred in San Francisco during the summer of 1967. As many as 100,000 people, mostly young people, hippies, beatniks, and 1960s counterculture figures, converged in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and Golden Gate Park. More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed hippie culture, spiritual awakening, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war sentiment, and free love throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City. An episode of the PBS documentary series American Experience referred to the Summer of Love as "the largest migration of young people in the history of America".
The 1960s was a decade that began on January 1, 1960, and ended on December 31, 1969.
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during or around 1964, and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores. A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When oppositional forces reach critical mass, countercultures can trigger dramatic cultural changes. Countercultures differ from subcultures.
"Revolution" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by John Lennon and credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership. Three versions of the song were recorded and released in 1968, all during sessions for the Beatles' self-titled double album, also known as the "White Album": a slow, bluesy arrangement included on the album; an abstract sound collage that originated as the latter part of "Revolution 1" and appears on the same album; and the faster, hard rock version similar to "Revolution 1", released as the B-side of "Hey Jude". Although the single version was issued first, it was recorded several weeks after "Revolution 1", intended for release as a single. A music video for the song was shot using the backing track from the single version, their appearances reflecting the song's atmosphere, along with live-sung lyrics that more closely resemble the album version.
The English rock band the Beatles, comprising John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, are commonly regarded as the foremost and most influential band in popular music history. They sparked the "Beatlemania" phenomenon in 1963, gained international superstardom in 1964, and remained active until their break-up in 1970. Over the latter half of the decade, they were often viewed as orchestrators of society's developments. Their recognition concerns their effect on the era's youth and counterculture, British identity, popular music's evolution into an art form, and their unprecedented following.
Flower power was a slogan used during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a symbol of passive resistance and nonviolence. It is rooted in the opposition movement to the Vietnam War. The expression was coined by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1965 as a means to transform war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles. Hippies embraced the symbolism by dressing in clothing with embroidered flowers and vibrant colors, wearing flowers in their hair, and distributing flowers to the public, becoming known as flower children. The term later became generalized as a modern reference to the hippie movement and the so-called counterculture of drugs, psychedelic music, psychedelic art and social permissiveness.
"Give Peace a Chance" is an anti-war song written by John Lennon, and recorded with the participation of a small group of friends in a performance with Yoko Ono in a hotel room in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Released as a single in July 1969 by the Plastic Ono Band on Apple Records, it is the first solo single issued by Lennon, released while he was still a member of the Beatles, and became an anthem of the American anti-war movement during the 1970s. It peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 2 on the British singles chart.
The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam was a massive demonstration and teach-in across the United States against the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. It took place on October 15, 1969, followed a month later, on November 15, 1969, by a large Moratorium March in Washington, D.C.
"Baby, You're a Rich Man" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as the B-side of their "All You Need Is Love" single in July 1967. It originated from an unfinished song by John Lennon, titled "One of the Beautiful People", to which Paul McCartney added a chorus. It is one of the best-known pop songs to make use of a clavioline, a monophonic keyboard instrument that was a forerunner to the synthesizer. Lennon played the clavioline on its oboe setting, creating a sound that suggests an Indian shehnai. The song was recorded and mixed at Olympic Sound Studios in London, making it the first of the Beatles' EMI recordings to be entirely created outside EMI Studios.
"Yellow Submarine" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1966 album Revolver. It was also issued on a double A-side single, paired with "Eleanor Rigby". Written as a children's song by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, it was drummer Ringo Starr's vocal spot on the album. The single went to number one on charts in the United Kingdom and several other European countries, and in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It won an Ivor Novello Award for the highest certified sales of any single written by a British songwriter and issued in the UK in 1966. In the US, the song peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The Hard Hat Riot occurred in New York City on May 8, 1970, when around 400 construction workers and around 800 office workers attacked around 1,000 demonstrators affiliated with the student strike of 1970. The students were protesting the May 4 Kent State shootings and the Vietnam War, following the April 30 announcement by President Richard Nixon of the U.S. invasion of neutral Cambodia. Some construction workers carried U.S. flags and chanted, "USA, All the way" and "America, love it or leave it." Anti-war protesters shouted, “Peace now."
"More popular than Jesus" is part of a remark made by John Lennon of the Beatles in a March 1966 interview, in which he argued that the public were more infatuated with the band than with Jesus, and that Christian faith was declining to the extent that it might be outlasted by rock music. His opinions drew no controversy when originally published in the London newspaper The Evening Standard, but drew angry reactions from Christian communities when republished in the United States that July.
Alan Jules Weberman is an American writer, political activist, gadfly, and inventor of the terms "garbology" and "Dylanology". He is best known for his controversial opinions on, and personal interactions with, the musician Bob Dylan. Together with New York folk singer David Peel, Weberman founded the Rock Liberation Front in 1971 with the aim of "liberating" artists from bourgeois tendencies and ensuring that rock musicians continued to engage with and represent the counterculture of the 1960s.
The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon and political movement that developed in the Western world during the mid-20th century. It began in the early 1960s, and continued through the early 1970s. It is often synonymous with cultural liberalism and with the various social changes of the decade. The effects of the movement have been ongoing to the present day. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the civil rights movement in the United States had made significant progress, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and with the intensification of the Vietnam War that same year, it became revolutionary to some. As the movement progressed, widespread social tensions also developed concerning other issues, and tended to flow along generational lines regarding respect for the individual, human sexuality, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, rights of people of color, end of racial segregation, experimentation with psychoactive drugs, and differing interpretations of the American Dream. Many key movements related to these issues were born or advanced within the counterculture of the 1960s.
The hippie subculture began its development as a youth movement in the United States during the early 1960s and then developed around the world.
The Beatles staged their third and final concert tour of North America in August 1966. It consisted of 18 performances, with 16 shows in United States venues and two in Canada. The tour was plagued with backlash regarding the controversy of John Lennon's remark about the Beatles being "more popular than Jesus", death threats, and the band's own dissatisfaction with the noise levels and their ability to perform live. Their speaking out against the Vietnam War added further controversy to the visit.
In late August 1967, the English rock band the Beatles attended a seminar on Transcendental Meditation (TM) held by TM creator Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Bangor Normal College in Bangor, Wales. The visit attracted international publicity for Transcendental Meditation and presented the 1960s youth movement with an alternative to psychedelic drugs as a means to attaining higher consciousness. The Beatles' endorsement of the technique followed the band's incorporation of Indian musical and philosophical influences in their work, and was initiated by George Harrison's disillusionment with his visit to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in early August.
Adapted from Is It Still a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World?" by Edward Rothstein, The Times, Sept. 18, 1999, and other Times articles
Winner: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
On May 17, 1954, the Court unanimously ruled that "separate but equal" public schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional. The Brown case served as a catalyst for the modern civil rights movement, inspiring education reform everywhere and forming the legal means of challenging segregation in all areas of society. After Brown, the nation made great strides toward opening the doors of education to all students. With court orders and active enforcement of federal civil rights laws, progress toward integrated schools continued through the late 1980s. Since then, many states have been resegregating and educational achievement and opportunity have been falling for minorities.
Arthur Krock, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was for more than 30 years Washington Correspondent at the New York Times
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)In 1955, Emmett Till – a 14-year-old African-American visiting Mississippi from Chicago – was murdered after whistling at a white woman. His mother insisted that her son be displayed in a glass-topped casket, so the world could see his beaten body. Till's murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement, and his family recently donated the casket in which he was buried to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The woman at the center of the trial of Emmett Till's alleged killers has acknowledged that she falsely testified he made physical and verbal threats, according to a new book
In cocky, competitive San Francisco, where poetry slams outdraw Sunday sermons, the Six Gallery poetry reading that took place Oct. 7, 1955 has become nearly as much a part of the city's mystique as the 1849 Gold Rush or the 1906 earthquake.
The storied New York tabloid the Village Voice – already down to around two dozen employees – is now officially dead, its owner announced Friday. Half of the staff will be fired, with the other half hanging on briefly to work on an online archive, owner Peter Barbey told them, according to the Gothamist website. The publication has stopped publishing new material.
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When Sputnik was launched into orbit on October 4, 1957, people around the world understandably flipped out. Even today, Sputnik is remembered less as a scientific experiment than as a cultural sea change, and the spectacular cold open of the Space Race.
Chronicle columnist Herb Caen coined the word "beatnik" on April 2, 1958, six months after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite into space.
The march bore the signs of careful planning. The column with its banners – "Which is to be banned, the H-bomb or the human race?" – got off on time, and the long snake that slid down Piccadilly, Kensington High Street, and Chiswick High Road, managed with only discreet help from the police, not to obstruct what little traffic there was.
On 15 November 1957, SANE ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times warning Americans: We are facing a danger unlike any danger that has ever existed. Inspired by the enthusiastic response to its Times advertisement, SANE redefined itself as a mass membership organization, gaining 130 chapters and 25,000 members by the following summer.
SLATE officially organizes. Temporary SLATE Coordinating Committee includes Charleen Rains, Owen Hill Pat Hallinan, Peter Franck, Fritjof Thygeson and Mike Miller.
He was called El Hombre, "the Man," and for three decades he was one of Cuba's most controversial leaders. It would take Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution to unseat him.
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ignored (help)This section provides General Background information on the recent human rights situation in Cuba. The subcategory of Spanish Resources includes eight books on human rights in Cuba. The Socialism subcategory includes sources discussing the changing political environment in Cuba since the Cold War and the impact of the instability of Cuba's socialist system.
Tommy Allsup was part of Holly's band when the Lubbock, Texas, singer died in the Feb. 3, 1959, plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. Allsup flipped a coin to see who between him and Valens would get a seat on the plane and who would have to take the bus to the next stop on the tour.
Shoved into unheated buses on a "Winter Dance Party" tour in 1959, Holly – tired of rattling through the Midwest with dirty clothes – chartered a plane on Feb. 3 to fly from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Fargo, N.D., where he hoped he could make an appointment with a washing machine. Joining him on the plane were Ritchie Valens and, after future country star Waylon Jennings gave up his seat, J.P. Richardson, a.k.a. "the Big Bopper." Taking off in bad weather with a pilot not certified to do so, the plane crashed, killing everyone aboard. The toll was incalculable: The singers of "Peggy Sue" and "Come On Let's Go" and "Donna" and "La Bamba" were dead. Holly was just 22; incredibly, Valens was just 17. Rock and roll would never be the same.
The real Eddie Mannix was a thug from New Jersey who bribed cops, bedded hundreds of would-be actresses, ran with the mob and may have ordered the killing of "Superman" George Reeves.
Much of Close's own humor on stage was morbidly satirical. A gypsy of the counterculture – he hung out with Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary, was a prolific and proud abuser of drugs, and ran light shows for the Grateful Dead – Close said his comic sensibility was fueled by "social rage."
Although the beginnings of the 1965 March on Washington can be located in a number of places, it is perhaps best to begin with the origins of the chief organization behind the march: the Students for a Democratic Society. As a social movement organization, the SDS grew out of a parent group founded in 1905 called the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). The LID embraced a largely socialist orientation toward democratic governance; the organization was initially called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society before changing its name in 1921. Many prominent political thinkers were members of the LID, including Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippmann, Michael Harrington, and John Dewey (who was president for a short time). Growing out of the larger organization, the student section of the LID – aptly titled the Student League for Industrial Democracy, or SLID – existed in early 1960 on only three campuses: Yale, Columbia, and the University of Michigan.
From: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 77, No. 2, (Jun., 1983), pp. 390–406
The original broadcast air date of the report has not been verified.
Original article was updated on 2014-01-27
On February 1, 1960, four African American college students sat down at a lunch counter at Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, and politely asked for service. Their request was refused. When asked to leave, they remained in their seats. Their passive resistance and peaceful sit-down demand helped ignite a youth-led movement to challenge racial inequality throughout the South. (text and photos)
Governor Buford Ellington ordered today a full investigation into the activities of a television network camera crew...
SNCC evolved out of that Easter weekend at Shaw University. Students in the SCLC had wished, for some time, for a student-led organization. (There were student chapters within the SCLC, but Martin Luther King Jr. had not been pushing for an official student organization). Students wanted leadership opportunities and had different strategies than the SCLC leadership, which they believed moved toward progress at a glacial speed. At the 1960 Shaw meeting, students also expressed a fear that a strong centralized organization (even if student-led) would be a foe of democracy. Therefore, Baker and others established SNCC as a decentralized organization, with the national headquarters providing support and literature, including a newspaper, but not the strategy and leadership.
Here, told for the first time, is the remarkable story behind the most explosive espionage case of the 20th century...
The birth control pill arrived on the market in 1960. Within two years, 1.2 million American women were "on the pill." By 1964, it was the most popular contraceptive in the country. Looking back, Americans credit – or blame – the pill with unleashing the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The pill is widely believed to have loosened sexual mores, including the double standard that sanctioned premarital sex for men but not for women. But, according to historian Elaine Tyler May, this idea is largely a myth. As May explained to a Stanford audience, the pill's impact on the sexual revolution is unclear. What is clear is that the drug had a far greater impact within marriage itself.
Lee became a literary phenomenon upon the publication of Mockingbird on July 11, 1960. It was a best-seller and earned the author the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 – an astonishing feat for a debut novel. "No book in years has commanded the kind of volunteer claque which is now pushing an unassuming first novel toward the best-seller list's summit," wrote Newsweek in its profile of Lee that same year. The following year the Mockingbird film adaptation, starring Gregory Peck as the white lawyer Atticus Finch who defends a black man wrongfully accused of rape, was released. The film was also hailed an instant classic.
Before his inauguration, John F. Kennedy was briefed on a plan by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) developed during the Eisenhower administration to train Cuban exiles for an invasion of their homeland. The plan anticipated that the Cuban people and elements of the Cuban military would support the invasion. The ultimate goal was the overthrow of Castro and the establishment of a non-communist government friendly to the United States.
In 1961 CORE undertook a new tactic aimed at desegregating public transportation throughout the south. These tactics became known as the "Freedom Rides". The first Freedom Ride took place on May 4, 1961 when seven blacks and six whites left Washington, D.C., on two public buses bound for the Deep South. They intended to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional. In the first few days, the riders encountered only minor hostility, but in the second week the riders were severely beaten. Outside Anniston, Alabama, one of their buses was burned, and in Birmingham several dozen whites attacked the riders only two blocks from the sheriff's office. With the intervention of the U.S. Justice Department, most of CORE's Freedom Riders were evacuated from Birmingham, Alabama to New Orleans. John Lewis, a former seminary student who would later lead SNCC and become a US congressman, stayed in Birmingham. CORE Leaders decided that letting violence end the trip would send the wrong signal to the country. They reinforced the pair of remaining riders with volunteers, and the trip continued. The group traveled from Birmingham to Montgomery without incident, but on their arrival in Montgomery they were savagely attacked by a mob of more than 1000 whites. The extreme violence and the indifference of local police prompted a national outcry of support for the riders, putting pressure on President Kennedy to end the violence. The riders continued to Mississippi, where they endured further brutality and jail terms but generated more publicity and inspired dozens more Freedom Rides. By the end of the summer, the protests had spread to train stations and airports across the South, and in November, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued rules prohibiting segregated transportation facilities.
At the Vienna Summit in June 1961, Khrushchev reiterated his threat to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany if the West did not come to terms over Berlin by the end of the year. Rather than submit to such pressure, President John F. Kennedy replied that it would be a "cold winter." When he returned to the United States, Kennedy faced instead a summer of decision. On July 25 he announced plans to meet the Soviet challenge in Berlin, including a dramatic buildup of American conventional forces and drawing the line on interference with Allied access to West Berlin. This warning, in fact, contained the basis for resolving the crisis. On August 13 the East German Government, supported by Khrushchev, finally closed the border between East and West Berlin by erecting what eventually became the most concrete symbol of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. Although the citizens of Berlin reacted to the wall with outrage, many in the West – certainly within the Kennedy administration – reacted with relief. The wall interfered with the personal lives of the people but not with the political position of the Allies in Berlin. The result was a "satisfactory" stalemate – the Soviets did not challenge the legality of Allied rights, and the Allies did not challenge the reality of Soviet power.
So long as the Communists insist that they are preparing to end by themselves unilaterally our rights in West Berlin and our commitments to its people, we must be prepared to defend those rights and those commitments. We will at all times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us. Either alone would fail. Together, they can serve the cause of freedom and peace.
In 1961, British lawyer Peter Benenson was outraged when two Portuguese students were jailed just for raising a toast to freedom. He wrote an article in The Observer newspaper and launched a campaign that provoked an incredible response. Reprinted in newspapers across the world, his call to action sparked the idea that people everywhere can unite in solidarity for justice and freedom. This inspiring moment didn't just give birth to an extraordinary movement, it was the start of extraordinary social change.
Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by Peter Benenson, a British lawyer. It was originally his intention to launch an appeal in Britain with the aim of obtaining an amnesty for prisoners of conscience all over the world. The committee working for this cause soon found that a detailed documentation of this category of prisoners would be needed. Gradually they realized that the work would have to be carried out on a more permanent basis; the number of prisoners of conscience was enormous and they were to be found in every part of the world.
Around 2.7 million people left the GDR and East Berlin between 1949 and 1961, causing increasing difficulties for the leadership of the East German communist party, the SED. Around half of this steady stream of refugees were young people under the age of 25. Roughly half a million people crossed the sector borders in Berlin each day in both directions, enabling them to compare living conditions on both sides. In 1960 alone, around 200,000 people made a permanent move to the West. The GDR was on the brink of social and economic collapse.
On November 1, 1961, Women Strike For Peace (WSP) was inaugurated with a day-long strike by an estimated 50,000 women in 60 cities, all pressing for nuclear disarmament. The organization was composed primarily of mothers who feared the effects of nuclear proliferation on the short- and long-term health of their children. They were particularly concerned with levels of irradiation in milk and the increase in nuclear testing. WSP had the slogan "End the Arms Race – Not the Human Race," as well as "Pure Milk, Not Poison." Bella Abzug joined the group in its early organizational stages as an active participant in the New York contingent and as creator and chairperson of WSP's legislative committee. By pushing the organization to incorporate legislative lobbying into its efforts, she helped it to become an effective political force. By 1964, the emphasis of Women Strike for Peace had shifted to focus as much on the Vietnam War as on disarmament, protesting against the draft and the war's effects on Vietnamese children. Abzug remained active in WSP until she was elected to Congress in 1970.
Women Strike for Peace (WSP) was formed in 1961 after over 50,000 women across the country marched for peace and against above ground testing of nuclear weapons. By the mid 1960s the focus of the organization shifted to working against the Vietnam war. Dorothy Marder took photographs at many WSP demonstrations on the East Coast and her images appeared in WSP publications. Her photographs show the women behind WSP who wanted to protect their families from nuclear testing and a male-dominated militarism. Leaders of the organization include Dagmar Wilson, Bella Abzug, Amy Swerdlow, Cora Weiss, and many more are featured in Dorothy Marder's photography.
Editor's Note: October 30, 1998, Friday An article on Sept. 29 discussed the release of 60,000 secret documents on the killing of President John F. Kennedy. Their declassification occurred over a period, leading up to the final report of a citizens' commission created by Congress six years ago to dispel lingering suspicions that the truth had been hidden. Discussing criticism of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination at the time, the article said that one member, Allen W. Dulles, a former Director of Central Intelligence, had failed to tell fellow members that Kennedy had ordered the C.I.A. to assassinate Castro. The article did not cite evidence or authority for the assertion about the President. Earlier articles, on July 20, 1997, and Nov. 23, 1997, also declared without qualification that Kennedy ordered Fidel Castro's assassination. A number of prominent historians and officials with knowledge of intelligence matters in that era have asserted in interviews that President Kennedy gave such an order. But others, also close to the President, dispute their account. The Times's practice is to attribute or qualify information that it is unable to report firsthand. That should have been done in these cases.
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The event, held in the basement of the Harlem Purple Manor, a popular nightclub on East 125th Street, was called "Naturally '62" and was intended to promote African culture and fashion. What made the show revolutionary were the models: a group of nonprofessionals with unabashedly dark skin and natural, unprocessed, curly hair. They were part of the newly formed Grandassa Models, and they were as unlike any fashion plates as the crowd had ever seen. "It was a pioneering concept, women coming out on stage wearing their hair in a natural state," former AJASS member Robert Gumbs told The Post. "We didn't know how the community would respond. I think a number of people came to laugh." Yet by the end of the evening, audience members were cheering the models. And the show's slogan, "Black Is Beautiful" – printed on fliers and posters announcing the event – would become a rallying cry and movement celebrating natural hair, darker skin and African heritage.
In Operation Chopper, helicopters flown by U.S. Army pilots ferry 1,000 South Vietnamese soldiers to sweep a NLF stronghold near Saigon. It marks America's first combat missions against the Vietcong.
The Port Huron Statement was the declaration of principles issued June 15, 1962, by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a major radical student organization in the United States during the 1960s. Having only a few hundred members across the country at the time the Statement was drafted, SDS drew tens of thousands of students into its ranks as the movement against the Vietnam War grew – before a deep factional split destroyed the organization in 1969. During SDS's history of activism, 60,000 copies of the Statement were distributed. It has become a historical landmark of American leftwing radicalism and a widely influential discourse on the meaning of democracy in modern society.
In relation to the frequent cases of death by overdose, given the small therapeutic margin of these substances, it should be pointed out that this was a common method in suicide attempts. It suffices to recall, in this regard, the famous case of Marilyn Monroe, on whose death certificate it clearly states "acute poisoning by overdose of barbiturates" (Figure 7). The lethal effect of these compounds was such that a mixture of barbiturates with other substances was even employed in some USA states for the execution of prisoners sentenced to death. Furthermore, there are classic reports of fatal overdose due to the "automatism phenomenon", whereby the patient would take his or her dose, only to forget that he or she had already taken it, given the amnesic effect of the drug, and take it again, this process being repeated several times (Richards 1934). Figure 8 shows the evolution of number of deaths (accidental or suicide) by barbiturate overdose in England and Wales for the period 1905–1960. In this regard, and in the city of New York alone, in the period 1957–1963, there were 8469 cases of barbiturate overdose, with 1165 deaths (Sharpless 1970), whilst in the United Kingdom, between 1965 and 1970, there were 12 354 deaths attributed directly to barbiturates (Barraclough 1974). These data should not surprise us, since in a period of just one year (1968), 24.7 million prescriptions for barbiturates were issued in the United Kingdom (Plant 1981). In view of these data, the Advisory Council Campaign in Britain took measures restricting the prescription of these drugs. Meanwhile, the prescription of prolonged-acting sedative barbiturates was strongly opposed through citizens' action campaigns such as CURB (Campaign on the Use and Restrictions of Barbiturates), especially active during the 1970s.
Monroe died later in 1962 of a drug overdose, but tales about her alleged fling with the President grew increasingly tall. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tried to prove that the man on a secret FBI sex tape of Monroe was Kennedy, but he lacked definitive proof. Others claim Kennedy was involved in her death. Needless to say, the rumors are even less substantiated than the affair itself.
Americans have had a long, complicated relationship with the pesticide DDT, or dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, if you want to get fancy. First we loved it, then we hated it, then we realized it might not be as bad as we thought. But we'll never restore it to its former glory. And couldn't you say the same about America's once-favorite pop star?
Exactly 50 years ago, Decca's Dick Rowe turned down the Fab Four, so heading an unenviable club of talent-spotters who passed up their biggest chance. But is it all an urban myth? A new book suggests so
Complete and uncut footage of speech.
As Cosmopolitan's editor from 1965 until 1997, Ms. Brown was widely credited with being the first to introduce frank discussions of sex into magazines for women. The look of women's magazines today – a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines – is due in no small part to her influence.
Among the book's readers, reputedly, was John F. Kennedy, who in the fall of 1963 began thinking about proposing antipoverty legislation. After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson took up the issue, calling in his 1964 State of the Union address for an "unconditional war on poverty." Sargent Shriver headed the task force charged with drawing up the legislation, and invited Harrington to Washington as a consultant.
Ken Kesey, the Pied Piper of the psychedelic era, who was best known as the author of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, died yesterday in a hospital in Eugene, Ore., said his wife, Faye. He was 66 and lived in Pleasant Hill, Ore.
Milos Forman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' is, in some ways, the essential film document about the 1960s counter-culture.
Written with Fletcher Knebel and published in 1962, Seven Days in May tells of an attempted coup by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in May 1974 after the president negotiates a disarmament treaty with Russia. It was at the top of The New York Times's best-seller list in early 1963 and was made into a movie, with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Fredric March, in 1964.
Legendary jock entertained and informed New Yorkers in the '60s and '70s by bringing on guests like Bob Dylan and Abbie Hoffman.
In 1963, a rock group named the Kingsmen recorded the song "Louie, Louie." The popularity of the song and difficulty in discerning the lyrics led some people to suspect the song was obscene. The FBI was asked to investigate whether or not those involved with the song violated laws against the interstate transportation of obscene material. The limited investigation lasted from February to May 1964 and discovered no evidence of obscenity.
According to rock music historian Peter Blecha, advances in recording technology have revealed an actual obscenity on the Kingsmen's recording of "Louie Louie." About 54 seconds in, Blecha said, Easton uses a barely audible profanity after fumbling with a drumstick.
Nevertheless, it was that picture which shocked President John F. Kennedy, who immediately ordered a review of his administration's Vietnam policy. The review led to more troops, not fewer.
He chronicled the regime of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and the homegrown opposition led by Buddhist monks. On June 11, 1963, Mr. Browne was present when an elderly monk named Thich Quang Duc, wearing sandals and a robe, calmly sat cross-legged on a cushion in the center of an intersection in Saigon. Other monks poured fuel over him, and the monk struck a match and was immediately engulfed in flames. Mr. Browne shot roll after roll of film, documenting the self-immolation.
In its June 28, 1963, issue, LIFE confronted the assassination with a combination of scorn (for the Klan and for white supremacists in general), anger (at the waste of such a life as Evers') and an occasionally sardonic venom.
Syllabus: Because of the prohibition of the First Amendment against the enactment by Congress of any law "respecting an establishment of religion," which is made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment, no state law or school board may require that passages from the Bible be read or that the Lord's Prayer be recited in the public schools of a State at the beginning of each school day – even if individual students may be excused from attending or participating in such exercises upon written request of their parents.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair was an outspoken advocate of atheism and the founder of the organization American Atheists. In 1960 O'Hair gained notoriety when she sued Baltimore public schools for requiring students to read from the Bible and to recite the Lord's Prayer at school exercises.
That seminal moment at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan went from zero to hero in the course of a weekend.
Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined; as the session which enacted the most far-reaching tax cut of our time; as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States; as the session which finally recognized the health needs of all our older citizens; as the session which reformed our tangled transportation and transit policies; as the session which achieved the most effective, efficient foreign aid program ever; and as the session which helped to build more homes, more schools, more libraries, and more hospitals than any single session of Congress in the history of our Republic.
President Lyndon Johnson stood in the Capitol on Jan. 8, 1964, and, in his first State of the Union address, committed the nation to a war on poverty. "We shall not rest until that war is won," Johnson said. "The richest nation on Earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it." It was an effort that had been explored under President Kennedy, but it firmly – and quickly – took shape under Johnson.
On this date in 1962, the House passed the 24th Amendment, outlawing the poll tax as a voting requirement in federal elections, by a vote of 295 to 86. At the time, five states maintained poll taxes which disproportionately affected African-American voters: Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. The poll tax exemplified "Jim Crow" laws, developed in the post-Reconstruction South, which aimed to disenfranchise black voters and institute segregation.
In Britain, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" saw its official release on December 5, 1963, reaching Number One the following week. It held the position for five weeks. Soon thereafter, American DJs began spinning the import single and the immediate, positive response prompted Capitol to not only bump up the release date to December 26, but also increase the press run from 200,000 copies to one million. A media blitz followed, as reporters from the Associated Press, CBS, Life, New York Times and more were assigned to cover the Beatles. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" reached Number One on the Billboard charts on February 1, 1964, and remained on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks.
After hearing too many "vague promises" from the New York City Board of Education to integrate the schools, civil rights activists in 1964 called for swift action: desegregate the city's schools and improve the inferior conditions of many that enrolled black and Latino students. To force the issue, they staged a one-day school boycott on Feb. 3, when approximately 460,000 students refused to go to school.
On the Billboard Hot 100 dated April 4, 1964, 49 years ago today, the Beatles made history as the only act ever to occupy the chart's top five positions in a week. With a 27–1 second-week blast to the top for "Can't Buy Me Love," the Fab Four locked up the chart's entire top five: No. 1, "Can't Buy Me Love" No. 2, "Twist and Shout" No. 3, "She Loves You" No. 4, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" No. 5, "Please Please Me"
No single person can be said to have created the worldwide cultural phenomenon we call "the Sixties". But the Dutch anti-smoking "magician" and voodoo showman Robert Jasper Grootveld has a better claim than most. In the early Sixties, his surreal, dadaist "happenings" in Amsterdam electrified the city's bored youth and led to the creation of the playful Provo movement (short for "provocation"). With the charismatic, flamboyantly transvestite Grootveld as a spokesman, Provo was a catalyst for cultural revolution. The group provided free bicycles, subverted a royal wedding and humiliated the stiff-necked Dutch establishment and Amsterdam police force so effectively that both groups – and the country – underwent a near-total personality change. Provo lasted only from 1965 to 1967 but the spirit of what Grootveld dubbed "International Magic Centre Amsterdam" broke old Holland, inspired hippies in San Francisco and musicians and artists in London and paved the way, among other things, for the summer of love, Dutch total football and the green movement.
Perhaps the mostly influential sesh in history happened on August 28, 1964 when Bob Dylan got The Beatles high at The Delmonico Hotel in New York City. While this was not technically The Moptops first-time toking – they shared a joint in Hamburg but couldn't agree whether or not they got high – they definitely copped a buzz with Dylan in New York.
Mario Savio addresses the crowd Mario Savio climbs on top of the police car containing Jack Weinberg to address the crowd of demonstrators. Savio demands Weinberg's release and the lifting of University prohibitions against political activity on campus.
He is the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence. He is the first to make the message of brotherly love a reality in the course of his struggle, and he has brought this message to all men, to all nations and races. Today we pay tribute to Martin Luther King, the man who has never abandoned his faith in the unarmed struggle he is waging, who has suffered for his faith, who has been imprisoned on many occasions, whose home has been subject to bomb attacks, whose life and the lives of his family have been threatened, and who nevertheless has never faltered.
On Dec. 21, 1964, Bruce was sentenced to four months in a workhouse for a set he did in a New York comedy club that included a bit about Eleanor Roosevelt's "nice tits..."
It's a short but bold and defiant oration that says free human beings aren't going to be pushed around by anybody, from lawmakers and police to liberals and labor leaders. Standing in front of a crowd of 4,000 people, Savio described his meeting with university officials, who compared the president of the university to the president of a corporation.
Malcolm X is best known as the fiery leader of the Nation of Islam who denounced whites as "blue-eyed devils." But at the end of his life, Malcolm X changed his views toward whites and discarded the Nation of Islam's ideology in favor of orthodox Islam. In doing so, he feared for his own life from within the Nation.
By May 1965, he was back in the Bay Area with 3,600 capsules of extraordinarily pure LSD, dubbed "Owsley" by a pot-dealing folk guitarist friend. "I never set out to 'turn on the world,' as has been claimed by many," Owsley says.
This article first appeared in the May 17, 1965 issue.
At the time, the idea of a commune – a place where young artists would live off sales of their work and share a bank account to buy food and supplies – was new and exciting. The concept attracted those who identified with the blossoming '60s counterculture. Prominent figures in the movement, including eventual Woodstock Nation members such as LSD guru Timothy Leary and the Doors' Jim Morrison, ventured to this plot of land in Trinidad. What they found when they arrived was a utopia born from the zeitgeist of 1960s America – a place unlike anywhere else in Colorado.
In 1965, the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut legalized contraception for married couples.
It was during that concert, 45 years ago today, that Bob Dylan plugged in his electric guitar, an action that would alter the landscape of American popular music for generations to come. On that day, as boos, shouts and cries for "the old Dylan" rose above the music, Dylan departed from his acoustic roots and ventured into the realm of rock 'n' roll, a genre generally disdained as commercial and mainstream by Dylan's bohemian peers of the 1960s American folk music revival. In doing this, the artist forged the way for the folk-rock genre, merging his lyrical songwriting style with the hard-driving sounds of rock.
The Watts Riot, which raged for six days and resulted in more than forty million dollars worth of property damage, was both the largest and costliest urban rebellion of the Civil Rights era. The riot spurred from an incident on August 11, 1965 when Marquette Frye, a young African American motorist, was pulled over and arrested by Lee W. Minikus, a white California Highway Patrolman, for suspicion of driving while intoxicated. As a crowd on onlookers gathered at the scene of Frye's arrest, strained tensions between police officers and the crowd erupted in a violent exchange. The outbreak of violence that followed Frye's arrest immediately touched off a large-scale riot centered in the commercial section of Watts, a deeply impoverished African American neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. For several days, rioters overturned and burned automobiles and looted and damaged grocery stores, liquor stores, department stores, and pawnshops. Over the course of the six-day riot, over 14,000 California National Guard troops were mobilized in South Los Angeles and a curfew zone encompassing over forty-five miles was established in an attempt to restore public order. All told, the rioting claimed the lives of thirty-four people, resulted in more than one thousand reported injuries, and almost four thousand arrests before order was restored on August 17. Throughout the crisis, public officials advanced the argument that the riot was the work outside agitators; however, an official investigation, prompted by Governor Pat Brown, found that the riot was a result of the Watts community's longstanding grievances and growing discontentment with high unemployment rates, substandard housing, and inadequate schools. Despite the reported findings of the gubernatorial commission, following the riot, city leaders and state officials failed to implement measures to improve the social and economic conditions of African Americans living in the Watts neighborhood.
McCartney's melodic bass work is a signature of the Beatles' oeuvre, but Harrison did a great job approximating it on the psychedelic Revolver meditation "She Said She Said" – one of the band's only tracks not to feature Sir Paul. "I think we'd had a barney or something, and I said, 'Oh, fuck you!' and they said, 'Well, we'll do it,'" McCartney told Barry Miles in the 1998 biography Many Years From Now. The song was inspired by Lennon's 1965 LSD trip with Byrds members Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, during which actor Peter Fonda told a frightened Harrison that he knew "what it's like to be dead." And the result plays like both a celebration and a mockery of the acid movement, driven by Harrison's stoned guitar shrapnel and dextrous, Macca-styled bass runs.
David Miller was not the first person to destroy a draft card. As protests against the Vietnam War increased in the 1960s, the destruction of Selective Service registration certificates became common enough that in August of 1965 President Johnson signed a law making it a federal crime to destroy or mutilate the cards. But after Miller publicly burned his draft card on Oct. 15, 1965 – exactly 50 years ago – he became the first person to be prosecuted under that law and a symbol of the growing movement against the war.
New York hippies have a new kick – baking marijuana in cookies...
She was beautiful, she could dance, she could sing, and she could act. Most importantly, she had that indefinable magnetism that attracts an audience and holds their attention. In short, she had everything it took to be a major star in the 1950s. Everything, that is, except white skin.
Even Beatles completists sometimes have a blind spot when it comes to the band's eponymous cartoon, which ran on ABC for four years – starting exactly 50 years ago, on September 25th, 1965. If you like your Beatles animated, chances are your thing is for the 1968 film Yellow Submarine, the rare cinematic venture that works just as well for the kiddies as the adults.
Eve Of Destruction, Barry McGuire, 9/25/1965
Today the band is little recalled by those who weren't there, but the Charlatans were the first important new rock band in San Francisco when LSD first rolled through town and things started getting weird. When the five-man band of Edwardian dandies in immaculate vintage wear returned from playing all summer 1965 at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, the Charlatans were the headline attraction at A Tribute to Dr. Strange, the Longshoreman's Hall dance/concert that was ground zero for the '60s San Francisco rock scene. ...Farther down the program that evening was another new band just starting out at a former pizza parlor in the Marina with the peculiar name of Jefferson Airplane.
In 1965, Hicks would become the drummer for The Charlatans, who, along with groups such as the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, would help define the city's psychedelic sound. Later, rock historians would cite the group's extended residency at the Red Dog Saloon in Nevada in the summer of '65 as being the precursor to San Francisco's LSD-focused rock shows of the later '60s because of the trippy rock posters used to advertise the residency, and the fact that the band would ingest psychedelic drugs while playing.
Malcolm X predicted that he would not live to see its publication, a prophecy fulfilled as friction between himself and the Nation of Islam, and a subsequent falling-out culminated in his 1965 assassination. But the pages chronicling the years leading up to it reveal the world of a man who had gone from being a hustler to being one of history's most controversial civil rights icons.
But what we do know that is true is that when Malcolm is assassinated on February 21, 1965, within two-and-a-half weeks the original publisher, Doubleday, exes the deal on the book. And in early March '65, they cancel the contract. That's why the book is published at the end of the year by Grove, not Doubleday. It was the most disastrous decision in corporate publishing history. They lost millions of dollars on this.
Morrison had set himself ablaze 40 feet from the Pentagon office window of then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, one of the chief organizers of the U.S. involvement in the war. Years later, a contrite McNamara wrote that Morrison's death was a tragedy "for me and the country."
"Things they do look awful c-cold," Daltry continued stuttering, "Hope I die before I get old." Daltry then screamed, drilling the purpose of the song into everyone's heads, "This is my generation!" And this truly was the youths' generation. All the years of old men from bygone eras had to pave way to Roger Daltry's generation, for the young men and women of the Western world were finally speaking up and letting their voices be heard. "It's my generation, baby," Daltry repeated his mantra.
Text and Link to Audio Program
This week in Santa Cruz, California, a concert, reading and site dedication will commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' first LSD-fueled Acid Test, held in the small neighborhood of Soquel on November 27th, 1965.
Article includes video of Nader reflecting on auto safety legislation.
#89 of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time
For most American teens, the arrival of the Beatles' "Rubber Soul" 50 years ago was unsettling. Instead of cheerleading for love, the album's songs held cryptic messages about thinking for yourself, the hypnotic power of women, something called "getting high" and bedding down with the opposite sex. Clearly, growing up wasn't going to be easy.
Timothy Leary, former lecturer in Clinical Psychology, was arrested at the Mexican border Dec. 23 and charged by U.S. customs officials with the illegal possession of marijuana. The agents seized five ounces of the drug. Leary, his two children, and two associates posted $2500 bond in Laredo, Tex., and were released pending action on the charge. In a telephone interview last night from his home in Millbrook, N.Y., Leary said he was unsure whether he would be indicted before a Texas grand jury and was awaiting word from his lawyer. Leary was dismissed from his Harvard lectureship in 1962 for absenting himself from classes without University permission. He and Richard Alpert, assistant professor of Clinical Psychology, who was dismissed at the same time, had been conducting experiments with psychedelic drugs. Alpert was fired because he violated an agreement with the University and administered drugs to an undergraduate.
For many, the psychedelic Sixties began at an event called the Trips Festival that took place in San Francisco the third weekend of January 1966. At the three-day blowout, between 3,000 and 5,000 people tripping on LSD – more than had ever experienced the drug together – let loose. Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia called it "total, wall-to-wall gonzo lunacy", noting there were "people jumping off balconies onto blankets and then bouncing up and down". Hell's Angels fought with other biker gangs while a member of the Merry Pranksters, the experimental LSD crew of author Ken Kesey – who attended the event in a "silver space suit with a helmet" – tried to pull Janis Joplin and her band off stage after just one song.
When the actress Jacqueline Susann was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1962, she made a deal with God: She would settle for 10 more years of life. . . if she could become the world's most popular writer. In the 12 years that followed, she became just that: the first novelist to achieve three consecutive New York Times No. 1 best sellers, and one of the richest self-made women in America. Her first novel, Valley of the Dolls, remains a pop-culture touchstone: a gleefully salacious story of friendship, sex, backstabbing and pills (or dolls) that won famous fans and detractors alike. (Susann, who died in 1974, made hundreds of appearances to support the novel and is credited with inventing the modern book tour.) Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, the tawdry tale of Anne Welles, Jennifer North and Neely O'Hara hasn't lost its punch. Here, a look at the vital stats behind one of the most talked-about books of all time.
Timothy F. Leary, convicted Friday on marijuana charges, told the Boston CRIMSON yesterday that a "battery of lawyers" would appeal his sentence of 30 years imprisonment and a $30,000 fine. The former Harvard lecturer on Psychology said he would also try to make his case a legal test of current laws on marijuana.
The doctor turned out to be the notorious society and show-business croaker Robert Freymann, supposedly the original "Dr. Feelgood." His past patients were rumored to range from J.F.K. to the Beatles, and a veritable Who's Who of prominent speed freaks still gathered in his office at an ungodly hour for his magic vitamins. ("Day or night he'll be there, any time at all," the Beatles sang in their musical tribute "Doctor Robert," which Paul McCartney admitted was inspired by the doctor "who kept New York high.")
From as early as 1962 until 1970, Leary had been arrested and incarcerated on drug-related charges in Mexico, British West Indies, Texas, New York, Michigan, and California. In April 1966, the Millbrook estate was raided by local police, led by G. Gordon Liddy then of the Dutchess County Sheriff's Department, and four people, including Leary, were arrested for possession of drugs. Following his arrest, Leary, to avoid constant harassment, founded the League for Spiritual Discovery which was a religious movement that sought constitutional protection for the right to take LSD as a sacramental substance.
Images of original EVO pages included.
Neal Cassady at Millbrook
It was a record of a great artist's mind, popular music's first long-form investigation into the psyche of an auteur.
A heavy whiff of fascism attended the rise to cultural power of teenyboppers and twentysomethings and the emergence of the pop messiah. "We're more popular than Jesus now," John Lennon infamously told London's Evening Standard in 1966, a comment that caused little stir in England but set off a fury here in the States, especially in the Bible Belt, where Beatles records and souvenirs were fed to bonfires, much as disco albums would be a decade later.
In 1967 the Monkees sold more records than the Beatles and Rolling Stones combined...
About the Film On October 6, 1966, the day LSD was made illegal in California a group of hippies, said to fall somewhere around 1,000 in number, gathered on San Francisco's Panhandle for the Love Pageant Rally. The organizers, Allen Cohen and Michael Bowen, were key figures with the San Francisco Oracle (12 issues between September 1966 and February 1968), an underground publication credited for shaping Haight-Ashbury's burgeoning counterculture. Cohen and Bowen framed the event not as a protest, but as a celebration of "transcendental consciousness" and the "beauty of being." While less known than events that followed, this gathering marked a seminal moment in the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. This short document of the Love Pageant Rally features several notable figures from the Haight-Ashbury scene at the time. Striking in the film is how clearly the movement is on the cusp of both of breaking through and falling, if not apart, at least away from its idyllic core. There are two primary focuses in its three minutes: Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a performance by Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin. Some groovy dancing does receive significant screen time, but for the sake of this brief essay, lets imagine they're grooving to Big Brother. The differences between where each stood in regards to their participation in hippie culture presents an interesting glimpse at the seismic shift the countercultural revolution rested at the edge of.
The Black Panther Party, formed in 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, was a revolutionary socialist organization that strove to end the oppression of black people in the United States. It adopted a ten-point plan that called for autonomy, employment, free healthcare, decent housing, financial reparations for slavery, the end of police brutality against black people, the release of black prisoners from jails, fair trials, and black nationalism. In practice, the Panthers focused much of their attention on policing the police, often resorting to violence. The FBI had taken notice. J. Edgar Hoover said in 1968 that the Black Panther Party was "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." By 1969, the Black Panther Party was well known nationally and had spread across the country.
The Black Panther: The Black Panther Party was a radical, revolutionary political group formed in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The Black Panther symbol had been used previously by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization which fought for black voting rights in Alabama.
Young rock fans take to the streets after the shuttering of Pandora's Box in 1966. The unrest inspired Stephen Stills' landmark anthem.
Los Angeles was the epicenter of rupture in the '60s – a civil rights uprising, a growing antiwar movement and a cultural revolution that was built in large part around the rock, folk and psychedelic music scene on Sunset Boulevard, which had quickly evolved from Frank Sinatra to Frank Zappa. For several years, the Strip was the international center of a movement that John Densmore, the Doors drummer, refers to as magical. "So we're the house band at the Whiskey a Go Go, and I'm sitting upstairs looking out the window," Densmore said. "It's like a Tuesday night, and it's complete gridlock and thousands of hippies on the street and I said, 'Wow, we're taking over.'" But the nightly throngs rattled the nerves of homeowners and some merchants. Local officials ordered a curfew and a crackdown. Pandora's Box, a popular club at Sunset and Crescent Heights Boulevard, had been scheduled for demolition, and rebels rallied Nov. 12, 1966, in an effort to save it. The Times reported that Sonny and Cher, Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda were among the demonstrators, and that Fonda was carted away in handcuffs.
Rather than cut nude scenes from Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni chooses to release it without an MPAA seal.
On December 17, 1966, the Diggers held a happening called "The Death of Money" in which they dressed in animal masks and carried a large coffin full of fake money down Haight Street, singing "Get out my life, why don't you babe?" to the tune of Chopin's "Death March."
On the night of Feb. 11, 1967, hundreds – maybe thousands – of people congregated in the international terminal of Kennedy Airport, not to embark on flights to far-flung places but rather, well, it isn't entirely clear or relevant. The gathering was an impromptu party, a nonpolitical demonstration, a happening named, in the spirit of the times, a fly-in. Now we might be inclined to see it as a prehistoric flash mob, an example of the power of communication technology to create instantaneous, ephemeral but nonetheless meaningful communities.
I remember Christopher Hills, who ran the Centre House, calling down one day, 'Can you please not smoke marijuana – we can smell it on the third floor.' After that we put in a guest book which said, 'I am not in possession of any kind of drugs,' and everyone signed it including Yoko Ono
After the elections, the committee became the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which organized major anti-war demonstrations that took place in April 1967. In New York City, 400,000 protesters marched from Central Park to the United Nations, with speakers including Martin Luther King Jr., and Stokely Carmichael. 75,000 gathered for a similar rally in San Francisco.
(Report with photos) Forty-seven years ago today, Muhammad Ali made headlines for refusing to be drafted into the U.S. Army on the grounds of being a conscientious objector, and it all happened here in Houston. It would set off a chain of events that wouldn't cease until a 1971 Supreme Court decision reversed his conviction.
Footage from the 14 Hour Technicolor dream
It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers' invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.
Twelve issues of Yarrowstalks were published in Philadelphia from 1967 until 1975. Most of the activity was concentrated at the beginning of the period, in the heyday of underground press activity. The "summer of love" in 1967 saw the birth of about 100 underground publications nationwide, and Yarrowstalks was one of the first. It was the most physically appealing of the first wave in its creative use of color and artwork. In contrast to the other Philadelphia papers, Yarrowstalks leaned away from the politics. Like New York's East Village Other and the San Francisco Oracle, Yarrowstalks was among the first underground paper to explore the graphic possibilities of cold-type offset printing. Color was splashed over pages with sketches and text. The Oracle, particularly, was responsible for making newspaper graphics an art form, and it published some of the most beautiful and trend-setting psychedelic art of the 1960s. Yarrowstalks was Philadelphia's Oracle, and it was the first of the undergrounds to publish the cartoons of Robert Crumb, an ex-Hallmark illustrator who has become the leading artist of underground "commix." In his character, Mr. Natural, he captured the feeling of the movement. Mr. Natural graced Yarrowstalks that summer and subsequently appeared in most of the alternative publications in the country.
Since this article was written, the situation at Texas Southern has become even worse. A policeman was killed in rioting last week, and 488 people were arrested.
On June 1, 1967, six Vietnam veterans gathered in Barry's apartment to form VVAW. Another vet associated with the early days of VVAW is Carl Rogers. Rogers held a press conference upon his return from his Vietnam service as a chaplain's assistant announcing his opposition to the war. Barry recruited him and at some point he became "vice president" of VVAW. Other early influential members who are mentioned are David Braum, John Talbot, and Art Blank. Jan Barry also lists Steve Greene and Frank (Rocky) Rocks
With the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love sparking celebrations and events throughout San Francisco, we invite the New York Times best-selling author of Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and High Times in the Wild West and former San Francisco Chronicle senior pop music critic Joel Selvin to offer his insights into the lasting impact of the 1967 cultural revolution that was born in the Haight-Ashbury.
At the same time, Sgt. Pepper formally ushered in an unforgettable season of hope, upheaval and achievement: the late 1960s and, in particular, 1967's Summer of Love. In its iridescent instrumentation, lyric fantasias and eye-popping packaging, Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric guitars around the globe. No other pop record of that era, or since, has had such an immediate, titanic impact. This music documents the world's biggest rock band at the very height of its influence and ambition.
On June 10th and 11th, 1967 – one week before the Monterey Pop Festival and two years before Woodstock – tens of thousands of Bay Area music fans converged on the Sydney B. Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, for the first U.S. rock festival. Conceived as a promotion for the KFRC 610 AM radio station, the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival featured more than 30 acts, including the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds and Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, as well as a group of Hells Angels and an "acid doctor" to mitigate bad trips. Arguably, the festival was the true start of the Summer of Love, and this is its previously untold story.
The landmark civil rights Supreme Court case – which made it illegal to ban interracial marriage – was about more than black and white
Video of McCartney Interview
Some 200,000 people attended the Monterey Pop Festival over its three-day schedule, many of whom had descended upon the west coast inspired by the same spirit expressed in the Scott McKenzie song "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)," written by festival organizer John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas expressly as a promotional tune for the festival. The Summer of Love that followed Monterey may have failed to usher in a lasting era of peace and love, but the festival introduced much of the music that has come to define that particular place and time.
Article Summary: One sociologist calls them "the Freudian proletariat." Another observer sees them as "expatriates living on our shores but beyond our society." Historian Arnold Toynbee describes them as "a red warning light for the American way of life." For California's Bishop James Pike, they evoke the early Christians: "There is something about the temper and quality of these people, a gentleness, a quietness, an interest – something good." To their deeply worried parents throughout the country, they seem more like dangerously deluded dropouts, candidates for a very sound spanking and a cram course in civics – if only they would return...
That said, it's worth ploughing through almost any amount of detail to get to the story of Emmett Grogan, who in 1967 was one of the speakers who addressed the deeply unalluringly titled Dialectics of Liberation Congress at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. Grogan delivered a 10-minute speech all about 'effecting a real inner transformation' that was rapturously received by the assembled hippies. After the applause had died down, Grogan thanked the audience for their generosity, but pointed out that he was not, in fact, the first person to make this speech: it had originally been delivered by Adolf Hitler at the Reichstag in 1937. Whereupon the rapturous audience immediately turned into a baying lynch-mob.
"July 1967: A 'Legalise Pot' rally is held in London's Hyde Park; an advertisement in The Times, sponsored by SOMA, a drug research organisation, states: 'The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice.' Signatories include the Beatles, RD Laing and Graham Greene." – from 100 Years of Altered States, The Guardian Newspaper (July 21, 2002)
SF Chronicle excerpts and photos."
Death of Hippie was a mock funeral staged on October 6, 1967 meant to signal the end of the Summer of Love. Organized by the Diggers to convince the media to stop covering the Haight, attendees burned underground newspapers and hippie clothing. Leaders carried a coffin down Haight Street and the crowd stopped for a "kneel-in" at the corner of Haight and Ashbury.
Rumours of disagreements with Castro grew. After months of mystery Castro announced that Guevara, who was known to have a garibaldian yearning to liberate the entire Latin American land mass, had resigned Cuban citizenship and left for "a new field of battle in the struggle against imperialism". [web story is reprint of original article]
Photos & Text: top the Draft Week in December, 1967 at the Oakland Army Induction Center on Clay Street in downtown Oakland, California had many of the same actions that happened in October, 1967, just two months earlier. There was civil disobedience. Protesters blocked the doorway of the Center and were arrested. This time, protesters also sat down in front of the buses full of draftees. Draft eligible protesters publicly burned their draft cards in an open show of defiance against the draft and the laws that made it illegal to burn your draft card. Noticeably different in these photos is moderation of the police response. The streets were not cleared of protesters. Police did not stand with billy clubs at the ready. In the end, the draftees went into the center and the war machine continued.
Rallies across America have taken place in 30 US cities, from Boston to Atlanta, to protest against the continuing war in Vietnam. In Oakland, California, at least 40 anti-war protesters, including the folk singer Joan Baez, were arrested for taking part in a sit-in at a military induction centre. As many as 250 demonstrators had gathered to try and prevent conscripts from entering the building when the arrests were made. The 'Stop the Draft Week' protests are forming part of a nationwide initiative organised by a group calling itself 'the Resistance'. Accompanied by singing from Baez and others, the sitting protesters forced draftees to climb over them in order to get inside the building. As they entered they were handed leaflets asking them to change their minds, refuse induction and join the protests. Human barricade Police formed a human barricade to enable inductees to pass and then made their arrests. In New York, around 500 demonstrators marched to protest against the draft. Young men placed draft cards into boxes marked 'Resisters'. 181 draft cards and several hundred protest cards were presented to a US Marshal but he refused to accept them. The group then marched to a post office and posted them directly to the Attorney General in Washington. The anti-war movement took on an added gravity yesterday when Florence Beaumont, mother of two, burned herself to death. After soaking herself in petrol she set herself alight in front of the Federal Building, Los Angeles. Counter-demonstrations have been planned by the National Committee for Responsible Patriotism, based in New York. Parades have been scheduled for the weekend in support of "our boys in Vietnam".
The Pentagon march was the culmination of five days of nationwide anti-draft protests organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam – "the Mobe." But a singular spark was provided by the Youth International Party (Yippies), a fringe group whose leaders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, had announced that they planned an "exorcism" of the Pentagon. They would encircle the building, chant incantations, "levitate" the structure and drive out the evil war spirits.
Newton himself was arrested in 1967 for allegedly killing an Oakland police officer during a traffic stop. He was later convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to two to 15 years in prison. But public pressure – "Free Huey" became a popular slogan of the day – helped Newton's cause. The case was eventually dismissed after two retrials ended with hung juries.
Otis Redding, 26 years old, a former well-driller from Macon, Georgia, died in a plane crash in an icy Wisconsin lake on December 10. With him were the five teen-age members of the Bar-Kays, a group which made the popular instrumental, "Soul Finger," and who backed Otis on his recent tours and appearances. Otis was headed from Cleveland, Ohio, to a Sunday evening concert in Madison, Wisconsin. It was his first tour in the private plane he had just purchased. His plane hit the surface of the fog-shrouded Madison lake with tremendous force, widely scattering the debris. He was only four miles from the Madison Municipal Airport. On Tuesday, teams of divers were still dredging the bottom of the lake in a search for the bodies.
PCP is an addictive drug; its use often results in psychological dependence, craving, and compulsive behavior. PCP produces unpleasant psychological effects, and users often become violent or suicidal.
Fresh Air: Text & Audio of Interview w/Wolfe
Blue Cheer appeared in spring 1968 with a thunderously loud remake of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" that many regard as the first true heavy-metal record. One of the first hard-rock power trios, the group was named for an especially high-quality strain of LSD. Its manager, Gut, was an ex-Hell's Angel. (This biography originally appeared in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001))
With a crash of thunder, the ringing of ominous church bells and one of the loudest guitar sounds in history, a heavy new music genre was born in earnest on a Friday the 13th early in 1970. Its roots stretch back to the late Sixties, when artists like Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly and Led Zeppelin cranked their amps to play bluesy, shit-kicking rockers, but it wasn't until that fateful day, when Black Sabbath issued the first, front-to-back, wholly heavy-metal album – their gloomy self-titled debut – that a band had mastered the sound of the genre, one that still resonates nearly 50 years later: heavy metal.
Campus killings of black students received little news coverage in 1968, but a book about them keeps their memory alive.
... the Kerner Report, with its stark conclusion that "Our nation is moving towards two societies – one white, one black – separate and unequal" – was a best-seller. It was also the source of great controversy and remains so today.
This lecture was held at The Heritage Foundation on March 13, 1998.
Thirty years after one of the darkest moments in United States military history, three soldiers who happened upon the My Lai massacre and risked their lives to save Vietnamese civilians by aiming their weapons at fellow Americans were proclaimed heroes today by the Army.
The trouble followed a big rally in Trafalgar square, when an estimated 10,000 demonstrated against American action in Vietnam and British support for the United States.
Forty years ago, the world was on the brink of revolution. But while Mick was urging insurrection on the streets of London, John was preaching peace and love. In a series of incendiary, rediscovered interviews, Jagger and Lennon reveal themselves as never before or since: battling one another for the soul of rock'n'roll
I don't want to be part of a government, I don't want to be part of the United States, I don't want to be part of the American people, and have them write of us as they wrote of Rome: "They made a desert and they called it peace."
Clip Job: Yip-In Turns Into Bloody Mess as Police Riot at Grand Central (headline from archived article published 2010-04-10)
Caption:Members of the Youth International Party, or Yippies, gathering Grand Central Station for a sit-down demonstration New York, New York, March 22, 1968. (Photo by Tim Boxer/Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)
I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.
The song he recorded at Dodd's Studio One was Nanny Goat which some musicologists and reggae historians say is the first reggae song. Others argue that Toots and the Maytals' Do The Reggay, also done in 1968, and Games People Play by Bob Andy the following year, marked the transition from rocksteady to reggae. But for most, Nanny Goat was the game-changer.
Report of the Fact Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May 1968
After King's death, riots spread through Memphis. Some 4,000 National Guard troops were ordered into the city, and a curfew was imposed on the city...The riots soon spread across the nation – to Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City and Washington, D.C.
April 5, 1968. Vol. 91 No. 41
Bobby Hutton didn't get wounded during the shootout, but they murdered him after we were in custody.
The Bureau of Narcotics, a Treasury Department agency established in 1930, was combined in 1968 with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, a unit of the Food and Drug Administration, to form the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, within the Justice Department. Then, with the transfer of more than 500 narcotics investigators from the Treasury's old Bureau of Customs, the Drug Enforcement Administration was created in 1973.
Audio, Text & Photos
Tim Robbins: Nine Catholic activists – Father Daniel Berrigan, his brother Philip Berrigan and seven others – broke into the draft board, Catonsville, Maryland, and burned about 350 draft records, dragged them outside and burned them with homemade napalm in an act of protest against the Vietnam War... They waited for the police to arrive, and they waited for the trial to happen... it became a very large issue and went nationwide, and these moral questions that these Catholics were asking did become part of the national conversation.
A defining point was the burning of Selective Service draft records in Catonsville, Md., and the subsequent trial of the so-called Catonsville Nine, a sequence of events that inspired an escalation of protests across the country; there were marches, sit-ins, the public burning of draft cards and other acts of civil disobedience.
The skirmish escalated, growing into a full-fledged riot in the West End, lasting for almost a week. Six units of the national guard, over 2,000 guardsmen, were ordered to Louisville. Looting and shooting occurred, buildings were burned, two teens were killed, and 472 people were arrested
"The Mod Squad" featured a multiracial trio of nonconformist crime fighters: Long-haired rebel Pete. Black activist Linc. Flower girl Julie. On other long-running detective shows of the era, such as "Dragnet," they would have been cast as the disrespectful young people arrested during aimless protests or a raid on a free-love cult.
1968: Stewart Brand initiates The Whole Earth Catalog as "a Low Maintenance, High Yield, Self Sustaining, Critical Information Service." Self-published, with no advertising, it sold 1000 copies at $5 each.
Kirk's book uses the genesis and evolution of Whole Earth as an opportunity to survey the sea change in environmental and design attitudes that emerged in the 1960s counterculture but, he notes emphatically, eventually outgrew it.
Government sources originally reported that four people had been killed and 20 wounded, while eyewitnesses described the bodies of hundreds of young people being trucked away. Thousands of students were beaten and jailed, and many disappeared. Forty years later, the final death toll remains a mystery, but documents recently released by the U.S. and Mexican governments give a better picture of what may have triggered the massacre.
When Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood atop the medal podium at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City, bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists during the playing of the national anthem, millions of their fellow Americans were outraged. But countless millions more around the globe thrilled to the sight of two men standing before the world, unafraid, expressing disillusionment with a nation that so often fell, and still falls, so short of its promise.
The turnout for the march was around 25,000, half the number predicted by police and organisers. But, far from being disappointed at the low turnout Mr Ali said; "This is not the end. This is the beginning of the campaign."
This list highlights several key files that contain material on the October 31, 1968, bombing halt.
25 years ago...
It's a fourth-wall-shattering, stream-of-consciousness black comedy that mocks war, America, Hollywood, television, the music business and the Monkees themselves. These days, it is fondly remembered as one of the weirdest and best rock movies ever made, and a harbinger of the so-called New Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright are both fans. DJ Shadow and Saint Etienne have sampled its dialogue. According to director Bob Rafelson, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones both requested private screenings, while Thomas Pynchon attended a screening disguised as a plumber. But to the fans who had made the Monkees household names, it might as well never have existed. "The movie dropped like a ball of dark star," says bassist Peter Tork. "The simile of a rock in the water is too mild for how badly that movie did."
The five-month event defined the University's core values of equity and social justice, laid the groundwork for establishment of the College of Ethnic Studies...
Pioneer in ethnic studies: Early in 1969, the university agreed to many of the student demands, including the establishment of the nation's first and only college of ethnic studies. The strike ended March 20.
Release Date: November 22, 1968
On January 8, 1969, approximately seventy African American students took control of Ford and Sydeman Halls. The students quickly presented the administration with a list of ten demands for better minority representation on campus. Although the administration did not come to an agreement on all ten demands, the students left Ford and Sydeman Halls on January 18th, eleven days after the occupation began. The administration did grant most of the students amnesty, and President Morris Abram stated that every legitimate demand would be met in good faith.
A devastating, 100,000-barrel spill in Santa Barbara in 1969 killed thousands of seabirds and led to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act, the foundation of U.S. environmental law, and the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The 260,000-barrel Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 exposed thousands of that state's residents to the beach-fouling consequences of spilled oil. The 4.9-million-barrel Deepwater Horizon disaster, the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, stirred new and broad opposition to offshore development.
Forty-five years ago this week, violent protests and a 14-day sit-in over racism at Sir George Williams University exploded, causing $2 million in damage for the school.
George's rosewood ax, mics wrapped in pantyhose and Orson Welles' alleged son – the wild truth about the Fab Four's final show
Advertisement for the February, 1969 edition of Esquire published in the Village Voice
Jim Morrison, the Doors' cataclysmic, electroplastic lead singer, finally let it all hang out at a March 2nd concert in Miami, Florida, and in the outraged aftermath became the object of six arrest warrants, including one for a felony charge of "Lewd and lascivious behavior in public by exposing his private parts and by simulating masturbation and oral copulation." [Original article with discussion by author].
On Thursday, Florida's Clemency Board pardoned the late Doors frontman Jim Morrison for two misdemeanor convictions stemming from a 1969 incident in which he allegedly exposed himself. The pardon was requested by outgoing Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and the state Clemency Board unanimously granted it. In March 1969, a bearded, drunken Morrison was performing at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami when, during the performance, he allegedly asked the audience, "Do you wanna see my cock?" After the audience of more than 10,000 fans responded, he pulled down his pants and briefly simulated masturbation.
From the (Anthony Fawcett) book One Day at a Time
Gen. William Westmoreland, senior U.S. military commander in Vietnam, sends a new troop request to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Westmoreland stated that he needed 542,588 troops for the war in Vietnam in 1967 – an increase of 111,588 men to the number already serving there. In the end, President Johnson acceded to Westmoreland's wishes and dispatched the additional troops to South Vietnam, but the increases were done in an incremental fashion. The highest number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam was 543,500, which was reached in 1969.
Undeniably, CBS wanted Tom and Dick Smothers off the air because of the ideas they were espousing on their show, but eventually removed them by claiming that the brothers had violated the terms of their contract by not delivering a copy of that week's show in time. It was like the feds busting Al Capone: the crime for which he was convicted was a mere technicality, but it got Capone off the streets. In the case of CBS and the Smothers Brothers, they got them off the air. Fired, not canceled, as Tom Smothers invariably corrected people in an effort to set the record straight.
Between 1,000 and 2,000 mostly college students converged on Zap, a coal mine hamlet in Mercer County. The press was there and worldwide headlines resulted when the Guard moved in and rousted the by-then sleepy kids out of town, causing thousands of other Zap-bound students to turn around.
May of 1969 was a terrifying and unsettling time for students at the University of California, Berkeley. Activist efforts to turn an unused plot of university land into a park, "People's Park," were met with, at first, mild bureaucratic resistance, but tensions soon escalated, and, ultimately, Governor Ronald Reagan decided to break up a rally by sending in California's National Guard.
In 1969, John and I were so naïve to think that doing the bed-in would help change the world. Well, it might have. But at the time, we didn't know. It was good that we filmed it, though. The film is powerful now. What we said then could have been said now...-Yoko Ono Lennon, 2014. (Film hosted on YouTube.)
Judy Garland was found dead in London on June 22, 1969, at the age of 47. The coroner stated that the cause of death was "an incautious self-overdosage" of barbiturates. Her death certificate stated that her death had been accidental.
Mafia-owned and illegal, the Stonewall was a speakeasy-style bar with a jukebox and a dance floor. "To get in, you had to know the secret codes which is to say 'you're a friend of Dorothy's,'" said Bockman. But in the predawn hours of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall, full to the rafters, was raided by police. But unlike previous raids, this time the crowd pushed back. A six-day riot between gays and police began.
The Rolling Stones are to perform in London's Hyde Park for the first time since a legendary free concert for an estimated 250,000 people in 1969. The outdoor gig will take place on 6 July, a week after the group's first appearance at the Glastonbury festival. The rock legends famously played in the park just two days after death of guitarist Brian Jones in July 1969.
Dennis Hopper, 74, an actor and director whose low-budget biker movie Easy Rider made an unexpected fortune by exploring the late 1960s counterculture and who changed Hollywood by helping open doors to younger directors including Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, died May 29 at his home in Venice, Calif.
The Easy Rider soundtrack was a powerhouse collection of songs that included "The Pusher" by Steppenwolf, the acid rocker "If 6 Was 9" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Band's enigmatic "The Weight," which was included in the movie but covered by the group Smith on the album due to contractual issues.
The Story of Man's Greatest Adventure
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ignored (help)The song was released in 1969 and quickly became a counter-countercultural anthem – capturing backlash against hippies who were protesting the Vietnam War. The song made Haggard a darling of conservatives, and was one of several such songs hailed as anthems of the Silent Majority.
Author of 'On the Road' was Hero to Youth – Rejected Middle-Class Values Jack Kerouac, the novelist who named the Beat Generation and exuberantly celebrated its rejection of middle-class American conventions, died early yesterday of massive abdominal hemorrhaging in a St. Petersburg, Fla., hospital. He was 47 years old.
In the frigid fall of 1969, more than 500,000 people marched on Washington to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. It remains the largest political rally in the nation's history.
The occupation lasted 19 months, but its legacy lives on. The Chronicle's front page from June 12, 1971, covers the federal removal of the last of the American Indians who had seized Alcatraz Island in 1969.
Abstract: The 1970 draft lottery for birthdates is reviewed as an example of a government effort at randomization whose inadequacy can be exhibited by a wide variety of statistical approaches. Several methods of analyzing these data – which were of life-and-death importance to those concerned – are given explicitly and numerous others are cited. In addition, the corresponding data for 1971 and for 1972 are included, as are the alphabetic lottery data, which were used to select draftees by the first letters of their names. Questions for class discussion are provided. The article ends with a survey of primary and secondary sources in print.
Correspondent Roger Mudd reporting.
At 4 a.m., they knocked on the door. Mark Clark was on patrol at the time. He said, "who is it?" They said, "Tommy." He asked, "Tommy who?" They said, "Tommy Gun." That's when they started shooting and the bullet shot him in the heart. At that time it was a signal for police to come in shooting from the back. Deborah Johnson was pregnant with Hampton's son, she screamed "stop shooting!" They dragged Deborah out. Hampton was on his bed. He had been shot, one of the police put a sheet over his head and said he was "as good as dead" now. They arrested seven Panthers, wounded two and killed Mark Clark and Fred Hampton.
Re: release of 'Gimme Shelter'[ permanent dead link ]
'Flint, Michigan War Council': Around 300 people packed into a boarded up hall called the Giant Ballroom at 1800 N. Saginaw St. from Dec. 27–31 in 1969, according to MLive-The Flint Journal archives. FBI says otherwise about Flint meetings: FBI documents previously labeled "top secret" and released to the Vault said the War Council meetings in Flint was the last open meeting held by the Weatherman Group. "It was at this meeting that the decision was made to go underground and to engage in guerrilla warfare against the U.S. government," a page read with the heading "WUD 'Flint, Michigan War Council.'"That 'quiet' Weatherman Council in Flint exploded. Weather Underground leader Mark Rudd said in Flint during the group's "War Council" that people should expect violence that will make "the '60s look like a Sunday school picnic," according to a July 24, 1970 Flint Journal article. A federal grand jury in Detroit charged Rudd and 12 others who conspired during the 4-day meeting in Flint in 1969 to commit assassinations and bombings in four U.S. cities, according to the article in MLive-The Flint Journal's archives. The indictments claimed the group met at the Giant Ballroom on Saginaw Street to set up a coordinating agency that would guide bombings in Chicago, Detroit, New York City and Berkeley, Calif. The indictments followed a dozen previous charges unveiled in connection to "Days of Wrath" riots in Chicago. Weatherman members went "underground" following the Chicago indictments, thus the group was then known as Weather Underground. Investigators and law enforcement officials said the meetings were a "failure" at the time and that they were social in nature more than anything.
Theodore Roszak, who three weeks after the Woodstock Festival in 1969 not only published a pivotal book about a young generation's drug-fueled revolt against authority but also gave it a name – "counterculture" – died on July 5 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 77.
Michael James Brody, Jr., heir to the oleomargarine fortune and self-proclaimed savior holds a press conference at Kennedy Airport in New York. After disembarking from a plane with his wife, Michael Brody holds a press conference in the arrivals building of the airport. He says he wants to become well known to the public, because he plans to give away $50 million within the next year.
Text reprint and tearsheet images from original story with analysis by the author.
In New Orleans to open up a new ballroom, locally known as "the Warehouse," most of the Dead and their road crew were nailed in a dope raid in the same French Quarters hotel where members of the Jefferson Airplane were busted just weeks before. State and federal narcs rounded up 19 people in the Dead raid, and were none too polite about it, either."
Legendary blues guitarist BB King named Peter Green as one of the greatest exponents of the blues, and the 'only guitar player to make me sweat'. If Green had only written Black Magic Woman, his name would still have a place in blues rock history forever. His three short years leading Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac saw the band established as one of the biggest-selling groups of the 1960s. Yet at the height of their fame Green left the group, with his life spiralling into turmoil as drug-induced mental health issues took control. Rumours of his demise began to spread, and sightings of him became notorious. After years battling his mental illness, Green is writing and recording again. Featuring archive performances and interviews with Carlos Santana, Noel Gallagher, founding members of Fleetwood Mac and Green himself, this film tells the story of one of blues rock's living legends.
Clip from BBC Documentary. Peter Green and members of Fleetwood Mac give their accounts of the infamous LSD party at the Highfisch-Kommune in Munich. Band manager Clifford Davis claims that this was the night that Peter Green and Danny Kirwan became 'seriously mentally ill'. Peter Green says, 'I had a good play there, it was great.' This incident is the genesis for Ada Wilson's novel Red Army Faction Blues, which fully explores the situation the Peter Green walked into that night.
1969 was an interesting turning point in American cinema and no film better reflects that than Midnight Cowboy. Not only was it the first X-rated film to win the Best Picture Oscar but it presented a view of New York City that was the most bleak and depressing portrait since Ray Milland hit every seedy Manhattan bar in The Lost Weekend (1945).[ permanent dead link ]
How a troupe of twenty-somethings mobilized millions of Americans to speak out on the environment
When Earth Day was first created in 1970, it rode the coattails of a decade filled with social activism. Voting rights were strengthened, civil rights were outlined, and women were demanding equal treatment. But there was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Clean Air Act, or Clean Water Act. Fast forward 48 years and what started as a grassroots movement has exploded into an international day of attention and activism dedicated to preserving the environment. Officially, the United Nations recognizes this upcoming April 22 as International Mother Earth Day. Across the globe, millions of people take part in Earth Day. According to the Earth Day Network, one of the largest activist bodies organizing Earth Day events, people celebrate by holding marches, planting trees, meeting with local representatives, and cleaning up their local environments.
Book Review: Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory. The Hard Hat Riot of May 1970 has managed somehow to be both widely forgotten and universally remembered. The incident itself, in which rampaging New York construction workers beat up hippies and demanded that City Hall raise the American flag, is a piece of historical trivia; most Americans born after it have little inkling that it occurred, and even the people who were around at the time are likely to be hazy on the details. But the image of a pro-war worker in a hardhat punching a privileged protester is enshrined in our cultural memory. It's what the late '60s and early '70s were supposed to look like: college kids who hated the Vietnam War and blue-collar patriots who loved the flag.
Joe, like Patton, had its true-life historical hook. Two months before the movie opened, and on the very same day as the Hard Hat Riot in Manhattan, a middle-aged railroad worker named Arville Douglas Garland entered a Detroit university residence (known, apparently, as a hippie haven) and shot and killed four students – including his daughter and her boyfriend. Although equipped for the rampage with multiple weapons and extra ammo, Garland was ultimately handed a light sentence by the same judge who'd seen Joe as part of his deliberation process and rejected any prospective jurors who'd done the same. Garland was seen to be let off lightly, but justly so by the hundreds of supporters who sent the killer letters endorsing his actions. At the time, it was reported that no one wrote to suggest that Garland had given the murdered kids anything but what they deserved.
Students gather to protest the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State massacre. (Archival footage including speeches by Benjamin Spock, Jane Fonda, and Ron Young).
Later in life, Ellis, who ultimately got straight and became a drug counselor, expressed shame about what he had done. While the LSD no-hitter kept him in the public eye, he came to see it not as a point of pride, but as a sign that his drug use might have robbed him of his greatest professional memory.
But it was Ellis's claim, after he retired, that he threw his no-hitter while under the influence of LSD that cemented his standing as an icon of the sport's counterculture era, making him an intriguing figure to artists, musicians, filmmakers, and journalists – even after his death.
Davis was added on Aug. 18 to the FBI's list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. She has been accused of buying guns used in the attempt on Aug. 7 to free three San Quentin convicts undergoing trial in San Rafael, Calif. She has been charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution on state charges of murder and kidnapping.
From the Archives: A bizarre encounter between the president and the king of rock and roll
Peace, Love and Not Much to Eat "The youth subculture in the United States has found an untraditional way to observe this Christmas weekend. It's another rock festival – but – unlike previous such events, it seems to have happened almost all by itself, with little apparent organization." – CBS News, December 1970
[Archived/Reprinted.Originally published by the Daily News on January 13, 1971] CBS Gambles on Reality with New Comedy Series
The country was split between those supporting our efforts in Vietnam and those opposed to the war. Hawks, doves, hard hats, flower children, black power, Woodstock, Kent State and the silent majority were bywords for the most divisive American decade since the American Civil War some 100 years earlier.
People forget the intensity of opposing passions in 1971. No one was neutral. Friends and families were bitterly divided. If you supported the Vietnam War, you supported Frazier. And if you opposed it, you were in the corner of Ali, who had forfeited his title for refusing military induction in 1967.
Long before the first bell of their March 1971 fight sounded, the contest was billed as "The Fight of the Century" and, amazingly, it lived up to the hype. That night, a star-studded crowd watched two of the greatest fighters who ever lived battle for supremacy in the world's premier sports arena.
Mick Jagger and his Nicaraguan-born wife-to-be eventually arrived at 1700. Police and journalists exchanged blows in the frenzy. Hippies turned up on foot and bicycles, mingling with members of the international jet set, who arrived in Rolls Royces for the wedding.
The year 1971 had already been a hectic one for the Rolling Stones. In March, at lead singer Mick Jagger's urging, they became the first rock band to declare themselves tax exiles from the UK, relocating to France in order to escape England's high tax rates on the wealthy...The high-class wedding, writes journalist David Hepworth, "marked the establishment of rock and roll as a viable branch of high society."
The Secret History of the Vietnam War. The Complete and Unabridged Series as Published in the New York Times. With key documents and 64 pages of photographs
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation's security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.
When the dust settled, 39 people were dead – 29 inmates and 10 corrections employees – with more of the wounded to die in the coming days. It was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the days of the Civil War.
While Greenpeace had started as an anti-nuclear peace organization, it began to concentrate more on environmental issues when joined by two New Zealand scientists in 1975 who were strongly against whaling due to an incident they had witnessed years earlier in British Columbia. They had studied communications between whales trapped by fishermen and those which had managed to stay free.
Duane Allman, the leader and driving force behind the Allman Brothers Band, died Friday, October 29th, from massive injuries received in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Georgia. He was 24. He and the rest of the band had currently been in the middle of their first real vacation in more than two years.
The title is, perhaps, the best thing about the film that opened yesterday at the Plaza Theater. It cheerily evokes the image of groupies, warm beer, cheeseburgers, overflowing ash trays, efficient plumbing and inefficient air-conditioning, which freezes the air without cleaning it, in an endless chain of identical bed-sitters that are the homes-away-from-home for the members of a touring rock group.
Rich, gorgeous and well-connected, Edie Sedgwick was the party girl who lit up Andy Warhol's golden circle. As her life story comes to the screen, Rhoda Koenig unravels a very Sixties tragedy
But for rockers of a certain age, Montreux will always be best known for its rich musical history – including the roaring casino fire that inspired the English rock band Deep Purple's classic "Smoke on the Water." The story goes that on Dec. 4, 1971, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were playing a gig at the Montreux casino. The band was nearly 90 minutes into the show, cranking through "King Kong," when someone in the crowd fired a flare gun at the wooden roof, which instantly caught fire.
The "Free John Now!" campaign culminated in the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally" on December 10, 1971, headlined by John Lennon. Lennon and Yoko Ono took the stage around three in the morning with a dobro guitar and an impromptu band. They closed their short set with a song written especially for the occasion. "It ain't fair, John Sinclair, in the stir for breathing air," Lennon sang. Three days later, John was free. His case convinced the Michigan Supreme Court that marijuana and heroin were not equally dangerous, though state law had treated them that way, misclassifying cannabis as a narcotic and imposing long sentences for possession and sales. The Court released Sinclair from prison and, three months later, declared the state's marijuana laws unconstitutional.
Young also made a connection between two moving songs about heroin: Bert Jansch's "Needle of Death" and his own classic on the subject, "The Needle and the Damage Done."
Wildes' book tells the story of the Nixon administration's battle to deport Lennon, ostensibly for a prior conviction in the UK for hashish possession. The real reason? The government feared that Lennon's outspoken stance against the Vietnam War and other political beliefs threatened to influence the country's 18-to-20-year-olds in the 1972 election, just as the national voting age had been lowered.
he first Hash Bash was held as a celebration after the success of the "Free John Now" campaign that arouse in response to the incarceration of political activist and Ann Arbor local, John Sinclair. Sinclair was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for the possession of two marijuana joints in July 1969.
On that day in Laurel, Wallace, then a Democratic governor from Alabama whose views on race and segregation were becoming more out of place in 1972 America, had just finished his campaign speech when he stepped toward the crowd and was shot by Bremer. Wallace was paralyzed in the shooting and three others were also injured.
I'm proud that I went to Vietnam when I did, but what I say in the film is true: I am just so sorry that I was thoughtless enough to sit down on that gun at that time. The message that sends to the guys that were there and their families, it's horrible for me to think about that," she said. "Sometimes I think, 'Oh I wish I could do it over' because there are things I would say differently now.
Johnson was napping in his ranch bedroom when he suffered his last massive coronary, called his beloved Secret Service agent Mike Howard and fell to the floor, almost instantly dead. It was exactly two days after the presidential term he would have served, had he run again in 1968, and almost the same moment that his successor, Richard Nixon, declared a peace in Vietnam that had eluded LBJ and would not last.
Archival ABC News footage of Nixon address to the nation.
As a tall, freckle-faced youth of 16, he was kidnapped by a gang of Italian petty criminals who blindfolded him and chained him to a stake for five months. Eventually they cut off his right ear as evidence of their willingness to kill him unless a ransom was paid.
The mythology of Gram Parsons' short life runs deep, but perhaps nothing is as enigmatic as the death of the 26-year-old king of Cosmic American Music, onetime Rolling Stones cohort and founding father of alt-country.
The "Battle of the Sexes" captured the imagination of the country, not just tennis enthusiasts. On Sept. 20, 1973 in Houston, she was carried out on the Astrodome court like Cleopatra, in a gold litter held aloft by four muscular men dressed as ancient slaves. Riggs was wheeled in on a rickshaw pulled by sexy models in tight outfits, "Bobby's Bosom Buddies."
President Nixon announced House Minority Leader Gerald Ford as his choice for vice president to replace Nixon's first vice president, Spiro Agnew, who had resigned. President Nixon also talked about a new outbreak of war in the Middle East and about inflation in the U.S. Mr. Ford also spoke briefly.
The Polytechnic Uprising, as it has come to be known, dealt a blow to the self-confidence of the junta leaders and led directly to the toppling of the dictator and chief putschist of the April 21, 1967, coup d'etat that brought the junta to power, Colonel George Papadopoulos.
Timothy Leary, the counterculture guru whose Â"turn on, tune in, drop outÂ" preachings made him an anti-establishment icon in the 1960s, quietly cooperated with the FBI in 1974 and informed on a radical leftist group in hopes of winning his freedom from jail, newly released FBI records show.
For 125,000 Vietnamese-Americans and their descendants, April 30, 1975 marks the day their lives changed forever. On that date, Saigon fell to the forces of North Vietnam and thousands of "at risk" Vietnamese joined the dwindling number of Americans still left in Vietnam to be evacuated by Operation Frequent Wind a massive assembly of aircraft and ships that became the largest helicopter evacuation in history. With the fall of Saigon imminent, the United States Navy formed Task Force 76 off the coast of South Vietnam in anticipation of removing those "at risk" Vietnamese who had ardently supported our efforts to stop the Communist takeover of South Vietnam.
When NBC introduced a new late-night comedy show in 1975 called Saturday Night Live, Carlin was the comedian they turned to as the first guest host.
But to really understand the beginnings of what is now Saturday Night Live, you first have to forget what it has become. Now it's an institution. Back in 1975, it was pure counterculture. There had been nothing like it before, not really, and Lorne Michaels had to do battle with conventional network thinking to make it what he knew it had to be: a show full of amateurs doing comedy for people the TV industry didn't yet understand.
More than any other man, Elvis Presley has been assigned ultimate paternity for the children of the '60s. He introduced the beat to everything and changed everything – music, language, clothes; it's a whole new social revolution – the '60s come from it, said composer Leonard Bernstein. Before Elvis, there was nothing, the decade's most representative child, John Lennon, once said. But Elvis repudiated his progeny. Religious, anti-communist, unconflicted capitalist to the end, he neither aligned himself with the Woodstock generation's politics nor joined their countercultural party.
But on December 8, 1980, Lennon, returning with Ono to their Dakota apartment on New York City's Upper West Side, was shot seven times by a 25-year-old drifter and Beatles fan to whom Lennon had given an autograph a few hours earlier. Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. On December 14, at Ono's request, a 10-minute silent vigil was held at 2 p.m. EST in which millions around the world participated.