The Imaginative Crisis of the 1960s

The turbulent 1960s was a decade of false starts and unfulfilled promises. It began in 1960 with the election of John F. Kennedy, but his presidency was brutally terminated with his assassination in 1963. That same year, Martin Luther King, Jr, delivered his famous speech in Washington, DC, but in 1968 he too was brutally murdered. In that year, antiwar protesters disrupted the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The following year a rock festival at Woodstock, New York, attracted half a million young celebrants of the new counterculture. Yet the roots of these astonishing events can be traced back to some time in the 1950s.