The hippies also protested other forms of social and political injustice, such as communities tearing down buildings or removing parks and open space for development, and in modern innovations that resulted in harming the environment, such as smog and industrial pollution. Again, they brought attention to what was happening in cities and countries around the world, and the governments that were engaging in these practices. They planted flowers in vacant lots, urged people to love one another, and generally seemed to hate Richard Nixon and all the politics he stood for, from continuing the Vietnam War to hiding evidence he was behind the Watergate Burglaries. They wanted to be anything but mainstream and conservative, and so they dressed outrageously, lived outrageously, and fought for what they believed in.
The music and protests of the hippy era carried over long after most of the hippies themselves disappeared. Thirty...
Hippie Revolution Over the course of the 1960s, the United States saw great social and political upheaval, as countless young people revolted against a system that was fundamentally incapable of effectively representing them or their desires. Though the decade saw the development of a number of important social and political efforts, such as the civil rights movement, the hippie movement has come to define the era, and for good reason. Hippies
"...activists responded to what they considered other national ills of the decade -- a war in Vietnam and mounting pollution -- and they tried to influence and change certain businesses that they felt practiced or profited from those evils." (Farber 177) The rejection of conventional cultural norms also included the experimentation with drugs in an effort to experience altered states of consciousness. Another related characteristic was the rejection of social
S. A withdrawal from that conflict and the demise of the Johnson administration. Several events in particular galvanized the Hippie generation against governmental authority in the 1960s, including the response of various Southern state governments to the growing Civil Rights movement, especially after the disappearance and murder of Civil Rights activists from the Northeast and the use of state troops to resist Supreme Court decisions on the matter of school desegregation. However,
The values of middle class society were seen to be the related to and unavoidably supportive of the status quo. This led to the trends and fashions that characterized this movement; such as long hair and the use of rock music as a form of rebellion and assertion of 'liberal ideals'. Similarly, the use of drugs was also seen as part of this expression and a way of rebelling
Another interesting form of manifestation of the rebellion were protest songs, sung primarily by rock and folk bands about the war, political woes, and other issues of the day. Another historian writes, "Protest songs were always a part of American folk music, and showcasing them within the entire folk spectrum gave them a wholesome image. In this all-American guise, folksingers invaded the musical vacuum on college campuses during the late
American Society in the 1960s Music and American Society Music and American Society in the 1960s Music in the 1960s in the United States was much influenced by the emergence of major pop stars, such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Woodstock, another important musical influence, took place in Woodstock, New York, when 400,000 people converged on the small town in 1969 to enjoy concerts by the folk artists of the day and
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