Sixties Radicals, Then and Now : Candid Conversations With Those Who Shaped the Era by Ron Chepesiuk UVM HST96 (Moore) Sixties: Some Recommended Books for Further Reading

The Sixties
(History 095)

Some Recommended Books
for Further Reading

General Overviews
  • Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Routledge, 1997).
  • James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1997).
  • Edward P. Morgan, The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
  • Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1993).

    • Primary Sources
  • Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (New York: Praeger, 1984).
  • Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds., "Takin' It to the Streets": A Sixties Reader (New York: New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
  • Joan Morrison and Robert K. Morrison, From Camelot to Kent State: The Sixties Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It (Times Books, 1987).

    • Memoirs
  • Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years (London: Collins, 1987).
  • Walt Crowley, Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).
  • Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (London: Verso, 2001).

    • The 1950s
  • Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable : Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
  • Marty Jezer, The Dark Ages: Life in the U.S. 1945-1960 (Boston : South End Press, 1981).

    • Civil Rights Movement
  • Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters : America in the King Years, 1954-63 (Touchstone Books, 1989).
  • Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire : America in the King Years 1963-65 (Simon & Schuster, 1998).
  • Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
  • Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell, 1968).
  • Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize : America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (Penguin, 1988).

    • Early Student Movement
  • Wini Breines, Community and organization in the New Left, 1962-1968 : the great refusal (New York: Praeger, 1982).
  • Paul Buhle, ed., History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950-1970 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
  • David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement : Coming of Age in the 1960s (Ten Speed Press, 1993).
  • Tom Hayden, Memoirs
  • Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer : The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (University of Illinois Press, 1993).
  • James Miller, 'Democracy Is in the Streets' : From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Harvard University Press, 1994).
  • Kirkpatrick Sales, SDS: Ten Years Toward a Revolution ().

    • Assassinations and Conspiracies
  • James H. Fetzer, ed., Murder in Dealey Plaza: What We Know Now that We Didn't Know Then about the Death of JFK (Chicago: Catfeet Press, 2000).
         Using "assassination science", looks closely at the latest medical and other evidence indicating a possible government conspiracy to cover up the truth about the assassination. Also includes a highly useful minute-by-minute chronology of the fateful day in Dallas, November 22, 1963.
  • Anthony Summers, Not in Your Lifetime (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1998).
          Without endorsing a particular alternative conspiracy theory or trying to spin a new one, provides a comprehensive review of the many holes in the Warren Commission Report and the nefarious possible connections among Oswald, the CIA, the FBI, the Mob and the anti-Castro Cubans.

    • Black Radicalism
  • Elaine Brown, A taste of power : a black woman's story (New York: Anchor Book, 1994).
  • Harry Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete (NY, 1969).
  • David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This side of glory : the autobiography of David Hilliard and the story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Lewis Cole, 1993).
  • Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995).
  • Bobby Seale, Seize the time : the story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970).
  • Assata Shakur, Assata, an autobiography (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1987).
  • Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie : Robert F. Williams and the roots of Black power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

    • The War and the Anti-war Movement
  • Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: Americvan Combat Soliders and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
  • Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977).
  • Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977).
  • Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990s).
  • Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, The Indochina Story: A Fully Documented Account (New York: Bantam Books, 1970).
  • Dave Dellinger, From Yale to Jail
  • Bernard B. Fall, Last Reflections on a War (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967).
  • Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1972).
  • William A. Gordon, The Fourth of May: Killings and Coverups at Kent State (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1990).
  • David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972).
  • Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography (New York: Random House, 1968).
  • Richard Moser, The New Winter Soldiers : GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
  • The Pentagon Papers (New York: Bantam Books, 1971).
  • W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
  • Neil Sheehan, A Shining Bright Lie : John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988).
  • Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).
  • Wallace Terry, Bloods : An Oral History of the Vietnam War By Black Veterans (New York: Random House, 1984).
  • Tom Wells, The War Within : America's Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

    • Third World Struggles
  • John Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Grove Press, 1998).
  • William Blum, Killing Hope : U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Common Courage, 1995).
  • Ernesto Guevara, Guerilla Warfare: Che Guevara (Bison Books, 1998).
  • William Hinton, Turning Point in China: An Essay on the Cultural Revolution .
  • Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin
  • C. Wright Mills, Listen Yankee .
  • Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

    • The Counterculture
  • David Allyn, Make Love Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000) .
         An excellent social and cultural history of how greatly the most intimate of human relations -- and public and private attitudes about them -- have changed in the U.S. since the wild and libidinous Sixties.
  • Jentri Anders, Beyond counterculture : the community of Mateel .
         Anders was a member of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the early Sixties. Like many other Sixties youth, she headed later for the hills. This is a sociological study of the northern California communal and back-to-the-land movements she was in and what happened to them.
  • Peter Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall : A Chronicle (Counterpoint, 1998).
         Now a highly-regarded movie actor, Peter Coyote was once one of the key movers and shakers in the famous Diggers. He reminisces here about his earlier life in the Counterculture in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
  • Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
  • Barney Hoskyns, Beneath the Diamond Sky: Haight-Ashbury 1965-1970 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
          These intensely creative years really come alive again here through words and photographs. They're all here: Beats, Diggers, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Janis, the Dead, and all the other colorful tribes and eccentric individuals who made "the Haight" what it (so briefly) was -- and what it still represents as a byword for the Sixties Counterculture.
  • Marty Jezer, Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel (Rutgers University Press).
  • Lisa Law, Interviews with Icons: Flashing on the Sixties (Santa Fe: Lumen Books, 2000).
  • Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: The Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States c. 1958-c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1998).
         One of the few books that looks at the Sixties in a more global and comparative way. Unfortunately, it's in bad need of a good editor.
  • Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
  • Theodore Rosazc, The making of a counter culture : reflections on the technocratic society and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

    • Music Scene
  • Joel Selvin, Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and High Times in the Wild West (New York: Dutton, 1994). The inside dope on the origins of the San Francisco sound and the early years of bands like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.
  • David P. Szatmary, Rockin' in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll (Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987). The best single introduction because it speaks knowledgeably about the music but also situates the music within its social and political context.
  • Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll (New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1988). "The Rolling Stone" founded by Jann S. Wenner was -- and remains -- the premier publication on the U.S. music scene.

    • 1968
  • Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins, 1968--marching in the streets (New York: Free Press, 1998).
  • David Caute, The year of the barricades : a journey through 1968 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
  • Robert V. Daniels, Year of the heroic guerrilla : world revolution and counterrevolution in 1968 (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
  • Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America: Music, Policits, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988).
  • George Katsiaficas, The imagination of the New Left : a global analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987).

    • The Women's Liberation and the Gay Rights Movements
  • Susan Brownmiller, In our time : memoir of a revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1999).
  • Martin B. Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993).
  • Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, eds., The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998).
  • Martin B. Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993).
  • Alice Echols, Daring to be bad : radical feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
  • Robin Morgan, ed. Sisterhood is Powerful; An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement (Random House, 1970).
  • Roberta Salper, ed. Female Liberation: History and Current Politics (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1972).

    • The Backlash
  • John A. Andrew, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
  • Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1999).
  • Ward Churchill, Agents of repression : the FBI's secret wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988).
  • Alan Crawford, Thunder on the right : the "new right" and the politics of resentment (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
  • Susan Faludi, Backlash : The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
  • Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, The New Right and the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

    • The Legacies of the Sixties
  • Mary Silver Anderson, Whatever Happened to the Hippies (Miles & Miles, 1990).
  • Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic?: The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (New York: Times Books, 1987).
  • George Katsiaficas, The subversion of politics : European autonomous social movements and the decolonization of everyday life (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997).
  • Paul Lyons, New Left, New Right and the Legacy of the Sixties (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).
  • Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks, Beyond the barricades : the sixties generation grows up (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

    • Push Here to Go Back Home