The Clash of Two Countercultures

When did the Sixties end? In America’s Uncivil Wars (2006) Mark Hamilton Lytle describes the 1960s ‘as a set of experiences that stretch over 20 years, beginning somewhere in the mid-1950s and drawing to a close in the mid-1970s.’ He divides the epoch into three phases: ‘the era of consensus, from 1954 until the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963; the years from 1964 to 1968, during which most of the phenomena associated with the sixties emerged; and finally the era of essentialist politics, from 1969 until the fall of Richard Nixon in 1974.’