Counterculture Notes 1 .docx - Late 1960s counterculture...

Late 1960s counterculture progressive movements
• How does present-day American culture define the point of life?
– Basically, why are we here?
• What are the messages that surround us?
• According to the American Experience clip watched for today’s class, how did young
Americans in the 1960s answer the question “what is the point of life?”
– What factors were shaping how people understood the world and their place in
it?
– Does the video give us a fair understanding what the “counterculture” was?
• What was it about?
• 1960s Counterculture
–
– Harvard Professor Timothy Leary
• “Turn on, tune in and drop out.”
– Writer Theodore Roszak
• “There was a deep issue here – whether material affluence is what life is
all about…”
– World War II Generation
– Pete Seeger “Little Boxes”
–
• White Collar: The American Middle Class (1951) and The Power Elite (1956) by C. Wright
Mills
– White Collar depicted America as a dystopian bureaucratic “iron cage” and The
Power Elite portrayed those in political, economic and military circles as making
decisions that had national consequences.