Were the early 60s like the 50s? You know the 1960-63 roughly.
Reported.
A lot more like the late 50’s than the late 60’s, to be sure.
At least from my perspective as someone born in 1957 who spent a lot of that time drooling. Much like now.
That would hold up.
The early 60s were emerging slowly from the 50s. Men were traveling to space, the cold war was heating up, and then suddenly at the end of 63 Kennedy was dead and the Beatles arrived. Things were never the same after that.
“The Sixties” lasted approximately from 1964-1972.
Probably the Doper members who remember those periods think of Eisenhower as an old fuddy-duddy who liked to golf, while JFK was an exciting new President.
The world in general started changing rapidly after Kennedy’s assassination and the Beatles coming to America. But there still was a huge gap between the few cutting edge hip people and the ordinary person. My parents didn’t change at all in the 1960s. Students in my high school didn’t change much until my senior year in 1968. But in was the next two years that really saw the 60s spread down into the regular college student, although nobody looked like a stereotypical hippie. Our big revolts were wearing jeans to class and ditching the traditional freshman beanie. Not until the 70s did most college students look like what we think of today as the 60s.
Culturally, there were any number of “New Waves” that transformed their fields radically between 1960 and 1970. Literary fiction featured a gallery of hot young authors like Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, and Rovert Coover. “Black humor” which was not from black writers but a very dark form of comedic satire blossomed in the 60s. Science fiction went from a dead stodgy field to a vibrant literature with its New Wave. Art had op art, pop art, and Warhol. Movies started the New Wave with the French in the late 50s, but American movie makers caught up by the end of the 60s. And there was, you know, rock. The 60s were the most extraordinary decade for culture in the 20th century, although the 20s have their partisans.
I suppose I could go on, but the OP left the subject too open. Basically, the answer is yes, the early 60s were an awful lot like the 50s. The late 60s weren’t. There is no comparable time period change in the half century since.
As a kid (born 1952) things were pretty much the same until JFK was assasinated, followed immediately by the emergence of the Beatles and expansion of the Vietnam War. Then stuff changed really fast.
My older sisters graduated from high school in 1961 and 1962. Their experience was definitely 1950’s.
Right, and “the Fifties” were about from 1948 to 1963. And the 70s were from 1972 to 1980. Although you could make a case that the 60s actually ended on August 9, 1974, or maybe Mar 29, 1973.
The 80s are the only decade that firmly starts on the right date.
I think the 60s are really defined by the Summer of Love in San Francisco. 1967. Psychedelics, protests, peace and freedom. That’s when time belonged to the young. The old farts went to work and swore at the worthless hippies with their long hair and beards. The really old farts sat around watching TV and telling everyone those hippie scum would destroy the country with their free love. The youth rebelled and wanted nothing to do with the current social values. Vietnam was on the news every night, and our country was fed a line about stopping the commie bastard over there least they invade the mainland tomorrow. 1967 was really the dividing line. After that things were different.
Soft drugs were pretty much a non-issue in the 50s, and emerged roughly through the middle of the 60s. That was probably the most significant change in the culture. Also, the Vietnam war, which spread a cloud of pessimism over the age group that had previously though there would be a seamless transition into adulthood. At the same time, young women liberated themselves, and participated in the sexual revolution. I don’t think the three factors influenced each other very much, they were prettry much three separate phenomena with legs of their own.
From 1960-63, if you were drafted you didn’t go to Vietnam before your 2 years were up.
Less “caught up”, more “caught back”, I suppose, given how influential Hollywood directors were on the emerging auteur theory and, therefore, the French New Wave. It took a new set of eyes to see what were once disposable oddities or genre films as high art (a genre all its own), though; there’s a reason the term film noir is French, after all.
Ah, the British Invasion. Another example of foreigners taking an American form and re-importing it to much acclaim.
I’m one of those partisans, but the revolution of the 1920s didn’t have time to settle and peter out before it was swamped by the Great Depression and the Second World War. The Jazz Age, Weimar Germany, the Soviet Twenties, and all, was strangled in the cradle by the second great upheavals of the century, and after that it took a while for the Beats and their international counterparts to re-weird-ify the mainstream.
Kennedy was assassinated during my first semester in college, so for me everything seemed to happen at once. '50s was high school and '60s was college. I grew a beard and shaved my head and wore jeans, a poncho and sandals. I put away my violin and bought a guitar. But it wasn’t until '65 that some kids had long hair. And a year later, so-called hippies made the scene and drugs became popular. Then of course the “Summer of Love” and everything that implied. By '68 I actually lived in a commune of sorts, but I don’t know how typical it was for that time. It seemed like the styles in clothing and hair pretty much followed the Beatles. Music was everywhere, and our lives evolved along with it.
I was born in the fall of '60 and my first real memories are from the summer of '63 and beyond.
One thing I observed quickly as a kid was the styling of new cars in the 60’s were very different from those of the 50’s, even the late 1950’s. Most of our neighbors and acquaintances had cars that were 5-10 years old and I always noticed they were extremely different in styling from the cars that were from 1962+.
Cars always change in how they look over the decades, but the difference from the 1950’s to the 1960’s was always pretty extreme to me, even as a kid.
Just IMHO
I’ve often wished we had a better term than calling things by decades.
Because “The Fifties” lasted until the mid-60s, and when people say “The Sixties” they’re usually talking about hippies and demonstrations and the Beatles, and all that’s all mid-60’s til '72 or so.
I was born in 1958, and I totally agree with this sentiment. Those were the breakpoints of many cultural changes.
My old History prof maintained the 1950s ended in 1963 with the Kennedy assassination and the 1960s in 1974 with Nixon’s resignation.
For what?