HIST1811: The Sixties: History & Memory

The Sixties was an incredibly dynamic decade in the United States and around the world. It was a decade of powerful social movements from the Civil Rights and Black, Brown, Yellow and Red Power movements to the countercultural, student/campus, anti-war, feminist, and environmental movements. It was also marked by the rise of a series of New Right movements from the rise of the Barry Goldwater to the election of Richard Nixon and the transformation of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Major immigration reform, transformations in the nation's educational and health care systems, along side new patterns of consumption and new forms of media were also products of the Sixties. From the Cold War to the Vietnam War, from anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism to third world revolutions, Americans transformed the world and the US was transformed by the world in the sixties.Fifty years removed from the sixties, the idea of the sixties remains alive in the American imagination. It remains alive and in tension with the new movements, like Black Lives Matters, and in political thought, as, for example, in Donald Trump's repeated invocation of the "silent majority." Students will explore a wealth of primary sources and be introduced to the dynamic historiography of the 1960s. As a class, we will also consider how the sixties continues to serve as a powerful trope that organizes political and social thought in the 21st century.

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