Section outline

  • MON
    9/28
    Beats to Hippies: The Rise of Counterculture in the 1950s and 1960s
    How did counterculture radicals mobilize the politics of culture and self-expression? 
    SLIDES TO COME

    Primary Sources

    • Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1955) [LINK] or listen to a 1959 recording [AUDIO]
    • “The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City,” [PDF / HTML] from The Digger Papers (1968)

    Secondary Sources

    • Stephen Petrus, “Rumblings of Discontent: American Popular Culture and Its Response to the Beat Generation, 1957-1960,” Studies in Popular Culture 20, no. 1 (1997): 1–17 [PDF]

    Optional

    • Blake Slonecker, “The Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (2017). [PDF]

    Reading Questions

    1. Allen Ginsberg wrote "Howl" in 1955 -- reflecting on post-war society at large as well as, more specifically, his time in a state mental hospital with another poet, Carl Solomon. The poem both celebrates nonconformity and criticizes the evils of American culture -- embodied in the demon "Moloch." What themes of celebration and/or critique stand out to you in "Howl" -- and what specific lines or phrases demonstrate that celebration and/or critique?

    2. In what ways do you see Ginsberg's poem responding to the culture and politics of the United States after World War II, as we've discussed over the first few weeks of the class? What do you think was so controversial about the poem that led the government to put his publisher on trial for obscenity?

    3. Stephen Petrus's essay traces how the Beats were discussed in popular media, and how Beat writers, like Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, responded. How were the Beats represented to a broader American public, in magazines like Life? What was threatening and/or compelling about the Beats -- and what about them was also so easy to parody?

    4.  The Diggers's outline for a "Free City" offer a utopian vision of a post-consumerist/post-capitalist society. What seem to be the underlying beliefs or goals of this new vision? 

    5. Optional secondary source: Blake Slonecker traces the emergence of the "hippie" counterculture in the 1960s -- what are some of the key themes, goals, or ideals of this new counterculture? How would you connect or compare the hippies to the earlier generation of Beats?
     
    WED
    9/30
    The New Left, American Empire, and the Antiwar Movement 
    What was the New Left? And how did it connect to broader movements for social and economic justice and civil rights in the 1960s?
    SLIDES TO COME

    Primary Sources

    • Students for a Democratic Society, Excerpt from “Port Huron Statement” (1962) [LINK]
    • Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America,” Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador, 1969), [PDF] originally published in The Partisan Review (1966)
    • Statement by John Kerry of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1971) [LINK] (Please note that this source includes descriptions of violence)

    Optional

    • Michael Kazin, “The Port Huron Statement at Fifty,” Dissent, Spring 2012 [PDF]
    • Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright, eds., The American Yawp, Chapter 28, “The Unraveling” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 314-342. [PDF  / HTML]
    • Thomas Borstelmann, Chapter 1 (to page 36), The 1970s: a New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality, (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2012), 19-36. [PDF ]

    Reading Questions

    1. The Students for a Democratic Society's 1962 manifesto "The Port Huron Statement" was one of the founding documents of the "New Left" - a coalition of leftist organizations of the 1960s (as opposed to the labor/union-based "Old Left" of the early twentieth century). How does the SDS manifesto respond to the Cold War and the civil rights movement? What are some its major ideals or goals? And what, according to Michael Kazin, in our optional source, was so new about it?

    2. Susan Sontag's essay, "What's Happening in America" was originally published in 1966 in the leftist journal the Partisan Review. Then in her early thirties, Sontag was just emerging as a major American intellectual; "What's Happening in America" was one of her earliest essays to critique U.S. power. (One note on language: Sontag uses some identity terms that while common in the 1960s are outdated today; in some cases, she also uses expressly derogatory terms to mock the language/views of those in power.) What are some of Sontag's main criticisms of the United States? What does Sontag find promising about young people at this moment? 

    3. John Kerry's statement on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War was delivered at a 1971 U.S. Senate Hearing. Kerry had served in Vietnam from four months in 1968/1969 and the hearing brought him to national attention -- he would go on to run for political office in 1972 and would eventually be elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984. Please note, the testimony includes some brief though disturbing description of war crimes that Kerry and other Veterans were trying to shine a light on. How does Kerry seek to challenge U.S. exceptionalism -- the idea that the U.S. was a uniquely virtuous nation? And how does Kerry question the major reason given for the war in Vietnam -- stopping the spread of Communism?