I don’t mean as in the calendar years. For those who lived and were at least 15 or above at any point in the 1960s, what years would you say they spanned in a cultural, meaningful sense?
Myself, I feel the 60s truly began in 1965 and ended in 1974. While you had JFK’s assassination in ‘63 and The Beatles’ arrival in 1964,
American music was still competitive in 1964 - you still had active doo wop groups, teenage tragedy songs, and Phil Spector girl groups on the charts, you still had the American version of rock competing.
Kennedy’s murder was a tragedy, but the world moved past it with the World’s Fair in '64 and the promises of a Great Society that could emerge from the ashes of Camelot.
There were no combat troops in Vietnam yet in 1964.
LBJ won a second term that year in a landslide and was not teenage enemy #1 yet.
There were no major race riots that would also become part of the 1960s experience
I feel '65 is when the British Invasion really took hold and showed it was more than a teen fad; Vietnam truly began (in the sense of it becoming a major news item that began to dominate the nightly news), you had Watts and so on. The more peaceful Civil Rights movement of the earlier 1960s began moving in a more radical direction. Bombings by Leftist groups began. 1964 I feel is the last year of ‘populuxe.’
On a minor note, The Twilight Zone ended in 1964, too.
1974 it ends for me because
A) major American involvement in Vietnam was over
B) The Hippies had dissipated as a countercultural/radical force for change, and had become mainstream. The counterculture was subsumed by the larger culture and integrated into it. Long hair on a guy was no longer shocking in 1974.
C) Radical and left wing groups like SNCC and the Panthers had run out of steam by '74
D) The music had shifted from the Hippie age and began taking on funkier tones and Disco was right on the horizon;
E) Nixon - arguably the symbol of the anti-Hippie, older, silent majority - was forced out of office in disgrace, and the Hippies now had no real “enemy” to protest.
F) The mainstream economic liberalism championed by Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon was dead and politics began moving to the center with Ford, and would accelerate to our present right wing dominated political landscape through Carter and Reagan.
It depends on what your focus is. Mine wasn’t as much on the long hair hippie revolt aspect, so I see things differently. The sixties to me, were the decade of hope for solutions through brain power and positivism. That was fading by the late sixties, what with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the mess in Vietnam.
More than anything else to me, the end of the sixties spirit, came with the first Moon landing. That was both a high point, and a huge reason for a lot of people to let out a deep breath, and decide that we were done trying. The disappointment of realizing that beating the Russians to the Moon didn’t solve any of the bigger terrestrial problems was incredibly discouraging to the people who had previously done the best job of leading us forward.
Wow. I agree with Shodan. I think you nailed it. I’d go further and say the 50s were 1946-1964. The years of the Baby Boom.
I’ll also add that the Bicentennial began in 1975, and lasted two years. The government poured a lot of money into the Bicentennial as a way of making people feel good about being Americans again. If the 60s hadn’t ended with Nixon, they would have ended with the Bicentennial.
I would almost split it with the Early 60s being 1958-1964 and the Late 60s 1965-72.
My reason for picking 1972 was because that is when the run-up to the American Bicentennial really began. And at least in some circles people started to look way past the years since WW II and more into the future.
The way I see it, the earliest point for the Fifties beginning was Dior’s New Look: February 12, 1947. It was the key event signaling the end of wartime scarcity because of all the extra fabric involved. It also set the tone for women’s more restricted roles in the '50s.
By that token, the Sixties began in 1964* when Mary Quant introduced the miniskirt. What could be more obvious?
I date the beginning of the Seventies to Diane von Furstenburg’s introduction of the wrap dress in 1972. The DVF wrap dress has been credited with advancing women’s liberation in the 1970s as it was comfortable and convenient and practical like nothing ever seen before in women’s fashions (sort of the opposite of the restrictive New Look). It also coincided with the disappearance of the miniskirt for the next 10 years.
*I don’t remember miniskirts beginning to catch on in America until 1965 at the earliest, so this tracks with the OP’s estimate.
1964-1975. Late 63 actually with the JFK assassination, until the fall of Saigon. The second part of the Vietnam War coincides with the period because Johnson escalated US involvement almost immediately upon becoming president after Kennedy’s death. Saigon fell less than a year after Nixon resigns so that the saga of the Kennedy/Nixon presidencies also bracketed the period. It’s reasonable to argue that Nixon’s resignation ended the 60s era but the specter of further US involvement in Vietnam lingered until Ford announced that are was over.
Joking aside, you’re actually right: this is a pointless exercise, because all we’re really doing here is imposing a false narrative upon the past to gratify our need to compartmentalize things.
Culture is way too fluid for there to actually be some kind of discrete historical event that can be called “the sixties” and assigned a starting and ending point in any way that is actually meaningful.
“The 60s” is an actual entity only in as much as people persist in referring to it. It exists only because we have this compulsion to keep talking about it.
Disagree with guizot. The sixties wasn’t so much a period of time but a concept. Youth emphasis, environmentalism, civil rights and being “anti-establishment” were at the forefront of the time. I won’t comment on the start as I was too young to be aware, but I personally think most of that ended with the Kent State shootings in 1970. Young activists realized they could actually be hurt by espousing those ideals. I also think the same young activists were older and decided to move on with the business of living in the real world.
I may have been too young to participate, but by 1970 the environmental and civil rights messages of the time took hold in me and I embrace them to this day.
I can go one better: John Brunner, English science fiction writer who was the first to predict the World Wide Web in The Shockwave Rider (1975). When he died at a science fiction convention in 1995, news of his death broke upon the world via the web he had predicted.
I vividly remember when Disco got hot and realizing the rock days were behind us. Ending that era. Bob Seger recorded Old Time Rock N Roll expressing the frustrations of a generation getting passed by.
Culturally the 60’s started with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and ended with the start of Disco (Donna Summer and all the others)
The Beatles first appearance on Ed Sullivan was sort of the announcement to the US that the period of mourning was over. The beginning of the 60s could be around then. But then New Frontiers and the Mercury program started after JFK’s inauguration and before his assassination.
The 60’s ended on May 4th, 1970. Anger lingered after that.
