Sixties Counterculture: the Hippies and Beyond
When people in the early 2000s think about the 1960s, they might think first about the "hippies." Along with the civil rights movement, antiwar protests, and the Beatles, hippies were one of the most distinctive features of a very colorful decade. Hippies certainly attracted the attention of the media. Their distinctive appearance (bell-bottomed pants, brightly colored shirts, and long loose hair on both men and women), their drug use, and their psychedelic music provided powerful reminders of their rejection of the style and values of their parents. Yet the hippies were important for more than just their lifestyle and fashion choices. As members of a thriving and diverse counterculture, they expressed the deep dissatisfaction many other people felt with American culture in the 1960s. This chapter explores the meaning of the hippies' peculiar brand of cultural dissent.
Streams of Cultural Dissent
The hippies made up the most colorful, eye-catching, and nonpolitical subgroup of a larger group known as thecounterculture. Although some histories use the term counterculture to refer only to the hippies, the counterculture included several distinct groups that criticized developments in American society and advocated for social change in the late 1950s and through the 1960s.
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