The Six and the Sixties

Abstract

For the July 6, 1970, cover story, Newsweek magazine asked six prominent historians to each write a 2,500-word essay on the “Crisis of the American Spirit.” This editorial decision responded not only to the anxieties produced by a continuing wave of violence sweeping the nation, but also a fraught journalistic context. As the social and political upheaval that marked the end of the Sixties decade bled into the first months of the Seventies, both journalists and historians found their fields undergoing remarkably similar transitions. A new bottom-up social history mirrored many of the same characteristics of a so-called “new journalism.” By allowing the divergent views of six historians who spanned both generational and political differences to occupy sixteen pages of its magazine, Newsweek pushed back on the Nixon administration's charges of liberal bias and nearby rival Time's propensity to embrace a more traditional concept of the “American Spirit.”