"When Did the Sixties Happen?" Searching for New Directions

Abstract

The nature and breadth of protest movements in the 1960s continues to provoke debates. For years, scholars and participant-observers wrote largely top-down accounts of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), suggesting the organization generated much of the protest of the era. This essay argues that recent trends in the field, particularly the works of younger historians such as David Farber and Alice Echols, represent important attempts to move beyond SDS-dominated sixties histories and focus on neglected constituencies of the period. Using Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) as an example, the essay shows that the scope of the sixties (and early seventies) protest was broader than previously assumed, and makes a plea to merge movement history with social history.