This book uses humour and personal insight to weave tales, analysis, and history in this insider account of an enlightened populist student movement. The students involved took their citizenship seriously by asking the authorities who they were benefiting and who they were ignoring. They altered the prevailing culture by asking, “why not do something different”? Unlike other books on the Sixties, this book shows how predominantly working middle-class white students in a very conservative region initiated radical changes. They ushered in a new era of protecting women and minorities from discriminatory practices. This vivid account of bringing conservative students around to support social justice projects illustrates how step-by-step democratic change results in reshaping a nation’s character. Across the globe, students are seeking change. In the US, over 80 percent believe they have the power to change the country, and 60 percent think they’re part of that movement. This book’s portrayal of such efforts in the Sixties will inspire and guide those students.

This topical new study takes a new look at the causes, course and consequences of student activism across the world since its heyday in the 1960s. It starts with analyses of some of the most familiar - and romanticised - Sixties protests themselves, in the US, France, Germany, Mexico and Great Britain. It then goes on to examine more recent, and hazardous, examples of student activism, particularly in China, Korea and Iran. Throughout, the tone is hard-headed and analytical, rather than celebratory, exploring the similarities and differences across these protests and asking what they achieved. The contributors to the volume are: Ingo Cornils; Gerard J. DeGroot; Sylvia Ellis; Sandra Hollin Flowers; Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi; Bertram M. Gordon; J. Angus Johnston; Alan R. Kluver; Donald J. Mabry; Gunter Minnerup; A.D. Moses; Frank Pieke; Julie Reuben; Barbara Tischler; Nella Van Dyke; Clare White; James L. Wood; Eric Zolov.

This fascinating volume explores the historical and cultural events leading up to and following the student movements of the 1960s. Readers will learn about issues surrounding the goals of the activists, black power, feminism, and the role of drugs and music. This book also includes personal narratives from people who experienced the student movements of the 1960s. Essay sources include Lyndon B. Johnson, Kathie Sarachild, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Personal narratives include a girl's experience of feminism in the sixties, and Mario Savio's tense words about the California students who were facing trial.

originally published by University of Missouri (May 2004) Prairie Power is a superb collection of oral histories from the 1960s focused on former student radicals at the University of Missouri, the University of Kansas, and Southern Illinois University. Robbie Lieberman presents a view of Midwestern New Left activists that has been neglected in previous studies. Scholarship on the sixties has shifted in recent years from a national focus to more localand regional studies, but few authors have studied the student movement in the Midwest. Lieberman brings a fresh interpretation to this subject, challenging the characterization of prairie power activists as long�haired, dope smoking anarchists�who were responsible for the downfall of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). She argues that Midwestern students made significant contributions to the New Left and that their efforts were important not only in the 1960s but also had a lasting impact on the universities and towns in which they were active. The oral histories come from national leaders of SDS, homegrown Midwestern activists who were local leaders on their campuses, and grassroots activists who did not necessarily identify with either local or national organizations. Providing new insight into who participated in student protest and why, Prairie Power makes a significant contribution toward a more comprehensive history of the 1960s.

The causes, consequences, and follies of the sixties revolt.

While this book is a history of the student activism of the sixties, its mode of analysis goes beyond the essential facts and events, probing underlying causes that are not peculiar to this particular unrest alone but are endemic to the rise and development of such movements in general.

In 1969, the campus tumult that defined the Sixties reached a flash point at the University of Illinois. Out-of-town radicals preached armed revolution. Students took to the streets and fought police and National Guardsmen. Firebombs were planted in lecture halls while explosions rocked a federal building on one side of town and a recruiting office on the other. Across the state, the powers-that-be expressed shock that such events could take place at Illinois's esteemed, conservative, flagship university—how could it happen here, of all places? Positioning the events in the context of their time, Michael V. Metz delves into the lives and actions of activists at the center of the drama. A participant himself, Metz draws on interviews, archives, and newspaper records to show a movement born in demands for free speech, inspired by a movement for civil rights, and driven to the edge by a seemingly never-ending war. If the sudden burst of irrational violence baffled parents, administrators, and legislators, it seemed inevitable to students after years of official intransigence and disregard. Metz portrays campus protesters not as angry, militant extremists but as youthful citizens deeply engaged with grave moral issues, embodying the idealism, naiveté, and courage of a minority of a generation.

Based on empirical evidence derived from university and national archives across the country and interviews with participants, British Student Activism in the Long Sixtiesreconstructs the world of university students in the 1960s and 1970s. Student accounts are placed within the context of a wide variety of primary and secondary sources from across Britain and the world, making this project the first book-length history of the British student movement to employ literary and theoretical frameworks which differentiate it from most other histories of student activism to date. Globalization, especially of mass communications, made British students aware of global problems such as the threat of nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, racism, sexism and injustice. British students applied these global ideas to their own unique circumstances, using their intellectual traditions and political theories which resulted in unique outcomes. British student activists effectively gained support from students, staff, and workers for their struggle for student’s rights to unionize, freely assemble and speak, and participate in university decision-making. Their campaigns effectively raised public awareness of these issues and contributed to significant national decisions in many considerable areas.

These are 33 documents of a decade of dissent--college and high school writings that mirror disenchantment, discontent, despair and hope--writings that moved students and their allies to further analysis and action. They illustrate, as the editors note, "student concerns ranging from the search for personal identity and self-fulfillment to the need for revolutionary change in America. "We believe it is right to see the student rebellion more as affirmation than condemnation, more as a faith in the perfectability of man than a denial of this possibility." Familiar names appear in these pages: Tom Hayden, Cathy Wilkerson, Mark Rudd, Les Coleman, Bernardine Dohrn, Karen Wald, and more. Even more familiar are the issues dealt with: war, peace and the draft; educational relevance; black student demands; student-worker alliance; women's liberation; violent vs. nonviolent action; reform vs. revolution; political action, effective or ineffective. Major statements range from the catalytic and prophetic Port Huron Statement of 1962 to the 1968-70 documents reproduced here.--From jacket description.