The turmoil of the sixties had its roots in a series of seemingly unrelated events that took place in the 1950s. In 1954 in Southeast Asia a civil war divided the formerly unified Vietnam into two countries—North Vietnam and South Vietnam. Within a decade hostilities between those two countries would drag the United States into the Vietnam War. In Cuba, 90 miles off the coast of Florida, the authoritarian government of Fulgencio Batista was overthrown in 1959 by revolutionaries Che Guevara and Fidel Castro who began taking monetary and military support from the Communist Soviet Union. By the mid-sixties Che Guevara would become a socialist hero to thousands of American college students who were dedicated to revolutionary change in the United States. In the Deep South Martin Luther King Jr., a young African American minister, was making headlines leading non-violent protests against...