A GLOSSARY OF WORKS IN THE WORKS, and A SERIES OF MYTHS & “NOPES”
Here are BOOKS & ARTICLES that interpret the 1960s classic themes in ways you may not know.
These interpretations are vital, interesting, convincing, and rarely available in academia or in “the public square.” They are posted for those who are curious for a different view. They are posted in the spirit and enthusiasm of this entire enterprise which purpose is to publicize things unknown about the era – not esoterica, but things excluded from typical accounts out of a certain conceit that one view of the era prevail.
Who really was Malcolm X? Betty Friedan? Ho Chi Minh?
Were we close to winning in Vietnam?
In such a radical era, why was the Sound of Music the highest grossing movie?
Is there another side to the Civil Rights Act of 1964? . . .
Any time taken with any of these sources will repay the reader many times over with new insights and wisdom to understand the 1960-75 era and world we live in today.
PEA
January 2022
I. Overviews of the Period
Peter Collier & David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the 1960s, 1989.
Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, chapters 5-6, 2007.
Jonathan Leaf, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the 1960s, 2009.
Mark H. Lytle, America’s Uncivil Wars The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon, 2006.
II. Rock ‘N’ Roll: Soundtrack of the 1960s?
Christopher Anderson, Jagger Unauthorized, 1993.
Frederic Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business, 1991.
Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades – A Biography, 1991.
Dave McAleer, The All Music Book Of Hit Singles, 1994
Joseph Murrells, Million Selling Records: From the 1900s to the 1980s, An Illustrated History, 1985.
III. Vietnam: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
Peter Braestrup, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Ten in Vietnam and Washington, 1978.
Harry Crocker, Don’t Tread on Me, 2006.
Anthony James Joes, The War in Vietnam, 1954-1975, 2001.
M.L. Lanning & D. Cragg, Inside the VCA and the NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam’s Armed Forces, 1992.
Mark Moyer, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, 2006.
Rufus Philips, Only Vietnam Matters, 2008.
Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi-Minh: The Missing Years: 1919-1941, 2002.
Philip Short, Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare, 2004.
Susan Stern, With the Weatherman: The Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman, 1975.
IV. Radicals on Campus
Philip Caputo, 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings, 2005.
William A. Gordon, The Fourth of May: Killings and Coverups at Kent State, 1990.
G. Louis Hearth, ed., Vandals in the Bomb Factory, 1976.
David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, 1996.
—————, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, 2006.
Joseph Kelner, The Kent State Coverup, 1980.
Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, 1990.
E.C. Ladd & S.M. Lipset, The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics, 1975.
James A. Mitchener, Kent State: What Really Happened and Why, 1971
Dotson Rader, Blood Dues, 1973.
V. The Sexual Revolution & Feminism
Tammy Bruce, The New American Revolution, 2005.
Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in the America Since 1960, 1997.
Alice Echols, Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks, 2002.
Carolyn Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman – The Life of Gloria Steinem, 1995.
Judith Hennessee, Betty Friedan: Her Life, 1999.
David Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique, 1998.
James Q. Wilson, The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, 2002.
VI. A Problem Misunderstood: Civil Rights
Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited, 1974.
Louis De Caro, On the Other Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X, 1996
Terry Eastland, Ending Affirmative Action: The Case for Colorblind Justice, 1996.
John Fabanjong, Understanding the Backlash Against Affirmative Action, 2001.
Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy, 1987.
D. Hilliard et al., Huey: The Spirit of the Panther, 2006.
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s, 1995.
Dan La Botz, Caesar Chavez and la Causa, 2006.
Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America, 1995.
Philip F. Rubio, A History of Affirmative Action: 1619-2000, 2001
D.A. Sears & J.B. McConahay, The Politics of Violence: The New Urban Blacks and the Watts Riots, 1973.
John D. Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America, 1996
Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, 2004
—————, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, 1984
K.R. Timmerman, Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson, 2002.
VII. “Intellectuals”
Jeff Britting, Ayn Rand, 2004
Larry Ebenstein, Milton Friedman: A Biography, 1977.
Lee Edwards, Goldwater: The Man Who made a Revolution, 1995.
Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (chapter 13, “The Flight of Reason”), 1988.
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 2001.
Alfred S. Regnery, Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism, 2008.
VIII. Movies and TV
Irving Settel, A Pictorial History of Television, 1983.
“Entertainment Scene Presents: 20 Most Popular TV Shows Each Year in the 1960s,” www.entertainmentscene.com.
Aldo Tassonem, Antonioni, 2007.
IX. 1960s Fashion
Penelope Byrde, A Visual History of Costume: The Twentieth Century, 1992.
Marion Fowler, The Way She Looks Tonight: Five Women of Style, 1996.
Nadya Zimmerman, Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late 1960s San Francisco, 2010.
X. Moon Missions of the Sixties Era: Lunar or Lunatic?
Deborah Cadbury, The Epic Battle between America and the Soviet Union for Domination of Space, 2007.
Gerald J. DeGroot, Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest, 2006.
Michael J, Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, 2007.
David West Reynolds, Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon, 2002.
Hugh Sidey, “Why We Went to the Moon,” Time Magazine, July 25, 1994.
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff, 1979.
XI. Social Policy: The Not-So-Great ‘Great Society’
Joseph Califano, Jr. High Society: How Substance Abuse Ravages America and What to Do about It, 2007.
Elliott Curie, Reckoning: Drugs, The Cities and the American Future 1993).
Eric F. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, 1969.
Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 1981.
Frances Fox Piven & Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, 1993.
Fred Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities, 1997.
XII. The Transformation of the Justice: The Warren Court
Robert H. Bork, Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges, 2005.
Paul Finkelman and Melvin I. Urofsky, Landmark Cases of the United States Supreme Court, 2003.
Kevin Gutzman, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, 2007.
Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans, 2002.
S. Lesher and Bernard Schwartz, Inside the Warren Court, 1953-69, 1983.
B.A. Murphy, Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas, America’s Most Controversial Supreme Court Justice, 2003.
Jim Newton, Justice For All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, 2006.
Bernard Schwartz, A History of the Supreme Court, 1993.
A SERIES OF “NOPES.” WHAT WE THINK IS TRUE BUT ISN’T !!
- MYTH re campuses – Most college students were radicals.
NOPE! To the contrary, the majority of college students in the 1960s were not political crusaders, but normal kids who went to class, studied, joined ROTC, dated, and pursued other unremarkable activities. - MYTH re feminism – Great changes in sexual behavior that could constitute a “revolution” started in the 1960s; previous periods were straitlaced.
NOPE! To the contrary, though the era saw a rise in premarital sex, other times in American life had been considered sexual revolutions of sorts – with the urbanization of life starting in the 1890s; blossoming in the 1920s flapper culture, and even the debut of Playboy magazine, not in the 1960s, but in 1953. - MYTH re Black Civil Rights – Little progress in the economic, social, and educational condition of black Americans occurred until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
NOPE! To the contrary, the 1960s were a disastrous time for income growth and the black family. - MYTH: Without the Democrat Party, Civil Rights legislation would not have been possible.
NOPE! To the contrary, southern Democrats held a historic filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, led by West Virginia Senator and former Klansman/future Senate majority leader, Robert Byrd. Far more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights legislation of 1964. - MYTH re urban unrest – The riots of the 1960s were caused by poverty and racism.
NOPE! To the contrary, they erupted from opportunists taking advantage of relatively minor incidents (e.g., Watts, Los Angeles in 1965 from the arrest of a black drunk driver) and the lack of local resolve and authority to restore law and order. - MYTH re a well-known claim of corporate malfeasance – General Motors knowingly and callously produced the dangerous Corvair sedan as described by Ralph Nadar in his well-known book Unsafe At Any Speed.
NOPE! To the contrary, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation found the Corvair was a car of average safety and no more dangerous than other cars of its class. - MYTH television reflects the classic radical themes so familiar for the period of “sex, drugs, and rock & roll.”
NOPE! To the contrary, television shows how society was quite polite, family-oriented, patriotic, and deferential to tradition with such hits as The Andy Griffith Show, Bonanza, The Adventures of Daniel Boone, and Marcus Welby, M.D. to list just four. The networks even commissioned serious projects from Shakespeare to Arthur Miller and Noel Coward for all those radical college students on campus to watch. One of the most popular shows of our era was All in the Family which premiered in 1971, with its hero to millions of Americans, Archie Bunker – conservative archetype and enemy of the Counterculture if there ever was one. The liberal son-in-law is lampooned and named “Meathead.” - MYTH – Fashion of the 1960s was mainly wild patterns including tie-died, bell-bottomed pants, paisley, capes, and wildly fringed jackets.
NOPE! To the contrary, Sixties fashion was a conservative reaction to the suggestive clothing of the 1950s; Hollywood celebrities were hardly ever photographed in jeans, and the stereotypical “hippie look” of Haight-Asbury – inspired in its ridiculous ugliness by its self-destructive drug culture – died out almost as soon as it arrived. Most of 1960s society took formality and propriety in dress seriously. Heck, Brooks Brothers was the most influential clothier for American guys! Jackie Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn drove women’s fashion. - MYTH The Apollo program emerged from the sense that the Russians were winning the “space race” and to close the so-called “missile gap.”
NOPE! To the contrary, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy knew the United States was ahead of the Soviets in rocket and satellite technology, and the Sputniks of the late 1950s showed how primitive the Russian space program really was.
There was very little rock and roll at The Monterey Jazz Festival/Summer of Love in 1967, despite our impressions.
CHART/GRID
In the works: early to late 1960s/early 1970s – the radicalization of good intentions
Feminism: Betty Friedan/Helen Gurley Brown to Gloria Steinem and Patricia Ireland
University Students: to the Weathermen, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn,
Black Civil Rights: MLK/Christian Ministers/SNCC/Freedom Riders to CORE, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm Little (X), Jesse Jackson, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan