Section A, Unger, “Introduction”
1. As early as 1960, the authors contend, “forces stirred that would soon transform the lives of almost everyone.”  What do they mean by this statement? 

2. In the opinion of Irwin and Debi Unger, what accounted for the great social turmoil in America after 1965?

3. In general, why do the authors view the sixties as an era of sexual revolution?

Section B, Farber, “Preface” 
4. What is the goal of David Farber’s book?  What does he intend to reveal about the 1960s? 

5. Farber quotes sociologist Daniel Bell, who argued that Americans in the decade of the ‘60s were trapped in the “cultural contradictions of capitalism”(5).  What do Farber and Bell mean here? 

6. Is the story of the 1960s a “tragedy,” as Farber suggests?

Section C, “The Sixties Reconsidered: A Forum”
7. How do various Americans remember the 1950s?  Is there anything in particular that defined the age?

8. What did commentators mean when they called the 1950s "placid" or "tranquillized"?

9. Stephen Whitfield asks: "How then might the turn of the Fifties to the Sixties be explained?"  What is the answer?

10. In Terry Anderson's assement, why does the "baby boom" help explain developments in the 1960s?

11. How does a picture of the Fifties and Sixties depend on the figures one chooses to focus on?  What sort of image do we have of these decades when we look at mainstream Americans?  What picture do we get when we look at artists and intellectuals?  Why does that matter?

12. In what ways does David Farber think that race complicates the shift from the Fifties to the Sixties?

6. What did differentiate Nixon and Kennedy’s 1960 campaigns?

7. What made John F. Kennedy a powerful political figure?  Why did he appeal to so many American voters?

8. Were Americans, and Kennedy in particular, justified in their fears of worldwide communism?

Section D, Farber, chpt. 2 continued
9. Describe the outcome of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

10. How and why would third world countries become the new battlegrounds of the 1960s Cold War? 

11. Was Kennedy’s diplomacy successful?  Was America stronger and more secure as a result of his presidency?

Section A, Unger, chpt. 2, “The New Frontier–Great Society”
1. According to Irwin and Debi Unger, what was the purpose of JFK’s “New Frontier” program?  How did it reflect the values of American liberalism stretching back to the New Deal of the 1930s? 

2. Why was the term Camelot applied to the first family in the early ‘60s?  How does Theodore H. White’s “For President Kennedy” depict the lives of Jackie and President Kennedy? 

3. What were some of the basic findings of the Warren Commission Report?  Why did so many Americans refuse to believe the Commission’s final draft?

4. What else might the Warren Commission have done? 

Section B, Unger, chpt. 2 continued
5. What was the point of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative?  What elements of post-War liberalism did his policies contain?  How did Johnson hope to achieve his goals? 

6. Describe the War on Poverty?  Was it “winnable”?  What should the role of the government be when it comes to poverty, education, and healthcare? 

7. What are the positive and negative features of the Great Society?  Are Americans better off today as a result of LBJ’s social initiatives?

Section C, Unger, chpt. 8, “Judicial Activism”
8. What do the authors say about the role the Supreme Court has played through the nation’s history?  How has that role changed?  What is the meaning of the term judicial activism?  How is this used today?

9. In the landmark case Engel v. Vitale how did the Supreme Court challenge the legality of prayer in public schools?  What kinds of arguments did the justices make?  Were these legitimate?

10.  How did Griswold v. State of Connecticut alter the law concerning an individual’s right to privacy and personal freedom? 

11. What precedents did the last three cases—Mapp v. Ohio, Gideon v. Wainright, and Miranda v. Arizona—set regarding the “overbearing” practices of law enforcement officials?  Were these decisions judicious?

Section A, Farber, chpt. 4, “Freedom”
1. Describe the successes and failures of integration and racial justice Farber highlights in the years before 1960.  What role did the federal government play up to 1960?

2. What was the long-term impact of the sit-in movement?  What did it accomplish?

3. Explain the tactics young civil rights leaders employed in the early 1960s.  What strategies and philosophies did they use?  To what extent were their efforts successful?

4. What did the civil rights movement reveal about state vs. federal government policy?  How did the era of the ‘50s and ‘60s challenge the federal government to play a more active role in insuring social justice?

Section B, Unger, chpt. 5, “The Civil Rights Movement”
5. According to Debi and Irwin Unger, what events and critical moments in US history set the scene for the modern civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s?

6. What happened to the movement after Martin Luther King’s death? 

7. In 1954, Supreme Court Justices answered this question: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race . . . deprive the children of the minority group of equal education opportunities?” (123)  How did the Court answer this question?  What evidence and arguments did the Justices use?

8. Following the Brown decision, the White Citizen’s Council emerged in the South to exploit the resentment and bitterness many whites in the region felt concerning desegregation.  Even ten years after this famous court case, numerous schools in the South were still segregated. What is the chief argument made by the author of “How We Educate Our Children”?  What was the supposed threat posed by integration?

9. Why did King write his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”?  What purpose did it serve?  Is it an effective piece?

Section C, Unger, chpt. 5 continued
10. In “To Fulfill These Rights” President Johnson called for a new response to poverty and racism.  What does he identify as the major problems of black America?  How did he intend to deal with the issues?

11. In the selection titled “We Want Black Power” how do the arguments here represent a new militancy that goes beyond Martin Luther King and the mainstream movement?  How did the promoters of black power raise the issue of black consciousness/black identity?

12. After reading “What We Want, What We Believe,” describe the working strategy of the Black Panthers.  How did they want to redress racial injustices?

13. Why was Resurrection City a failure?  What forces conspired to destroy the work of the Poor People’s Campaign?  What does all this say about America in the Summer of 1968?

Section A
1. What does historian Brian Ward mean by the terms “pop biracialism” and “integrated market”? 

2. Shelley Stewart, a ‘50s-era deejay, believed that “Music really started breaking the barriers long before the politics in America began to deal with it” (Ward 128).  According to Ward, how did r&b and rock music alter race relations?

3. Describe the way the black community responded to Nat King Cole’s politics in the late 1950s.  Should entertainers such as Cole have taken a certain position on race matters? 

Section B
4. What was the mass black reaction to Elvis Presley’s popularity?  Similarly, how did black listeners respond to popular white deejays of the era?  What do these reactions tell us about the state of race relations in the early 1960s? 

5. What accounts for the dwindling popularity of what Ward calls “blacker” musical styles in the 1950s and ‘60s? (142)  How did black musicians respond to the public shift in taste?

6. How did a solo artist like Sam Cooke fashion his career to reach a wider audience?

Section C
7. Ward contends that in the early 1960s “girl groups” like the Shirelles and the Ronnettes represented a new kind of pop music and pop marketing.  Describe this new style.  What roles did race and gender play?

8. What was payola?  How did it affect the industry?  Why does Ward argue that Dick Clark and American Bandstand emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed?

9. How had rock and r&b changed in the first decade of its existence?  What accounts for the transformation?

Section A
1. What events in 1963-64 brought the civil rights movement to the nation’s attention?  Why did it rise in visibility and power?

2. Did Lyndon Johnson actually support the civil rights movement?  Describe his involvement.

3. What role, if any, did J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, play in the struggle for black equality? 

4. Was LBJ justified in his response to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention?

5. How and why did Stokely Carmichael come to the conclusion that black Americans “could not rely on their co-called allies”?  Was he right to assume that?

Section B
6. Describe Barry Goldwater’s 1964 platform.  How did his campaign contrast with that of Johnson’s?

7. Why did the 1964 election complicate America’s involvement in Vietnam? 

8. What were the root causes of urban violence that plagued American cities after 1965?  How did the federal government respond?

9. After reading Irwin and Debbi Unger’s preface to chapter 3, explain some of the basic differences between the new and old left.

10. Why did new left sociologist C. Wright Mills believe that the working class could not lead a social revolution?

Section C
11. Why were the young scholars associated with Studies on the Left dissatisfied with the academy?

12. What is the “new sensibility” Herbert Marcuse wrote about? 

13. In a 1964 speech, Mario Savio vented: “We have encountered the organized status quo in Mississippi, but it is the same in Berkeley.”  What did Savio mean by that statement? 

14. What did Jeff Shero and members of the SDS hope to achieve through their activities on the Columbia campus in 1968?

15. Describe the essential ideas and beliefs of the Weathermen underground.  What motivated these young left radicals?  Are there any social or political movements today that mirror this organization?

Section A, Grant Wacker, “Searching for Norman Rockwell” (photocopied handout)
1. Duke professor or religious history Grant Wacker suggests that even though Time and Newsweek dubbed 1976 “the Year of the Evangelical,” the movement had been flourishing for at least twenty years.  What were some of the signs of Evangelical growth in these decades?

2. What is the answer to Wacker’s question: “After decades of relative quiet, why did Evangelicalism mushroom like this in the 1960s?” (293)

3. What is the meaning of Wacker’s title “Searching for Norman Rockwell”, and how does that tie into the idea of “Christian Civilization”? 

4. Why is it that some stalwarts of the new right, including William Safire and Barry Goldwater, distanced themselves from the Evangelical Right?

5. Why did the Evangelical Right focus so much attention on sexuality, education, and the family?  Do you agree with Wacker’s basic assessment? 

6. How does Wacker answer the question: “Why are Evangelicals so powerfully attracted to the Christian Civilization ideal in the first place?” (311)

Section B, selections from the Church of the Nazarene’s denominational magazine, Herald of Holiness, 1968.
7. What critique did Paul Bassett, pastor and later church history professor at Nazarene Theological Seminary, offer of various protests movements in his article, “Strange Bedfellows”? 

8. What were some of Bassett’s basic questions for hawks and doves? 

9. Leslie Parrot, who served as president of ENC, writes of what he calls “the unhappy American.”  Why did he think Americans were so distressed, and what did he think the solution to this malaise was?

10. Judging from the three pieces on the War on Poverty, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and race relations, how would you describe the Church of the Nazarene’s position on social justice and race in the late 1960s?

11. The remaining selections deal with the church and youth, or the church and the emerging counterculture.  How did these few Nazarene authors address the generation gap and the secular youth culture of the era? 

2. How did Kane come to know the fab-four?  What did Kane remember about the Beatles?

3. Describe the scene at the Madison Hotel in Boston?  What does Kane’s description of the press conference say about fans?

4. How does Jim Morin recall the concert at Boston Garden?  What stands out to him? 

Section B, George Lipsitz, “Who'll Stop the Rain? Youth Culture, Rock 'n' Roll, and Social Crises,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History (CP)
5. According to George Lipsitz, what did it mean to be young in the 1960s?

6. Lipsitz remarks that any “account of the sixties inevitably runs up against our collective societal capacities for remembering and forgetting” (Lipsitz 208)  Explain what he means by this.

7. What is the answer to Lipsitz’s question: “Was popular music in the sixties the product of young people struggling to establish their own artistic vision, or was it the creation of marketing executives eager to cash in on demographic trends by tailoring mass media commodities to the interests of the nation’s largest age cohort?” (211) 

8. What new elements of the music business helped change the industry in the 1960s?

Section C
9. Explain Lipsitz’s main point in the section titled “Dancing in the Street” (213-219).  How was public space transformed?

10. Lipsitz states that the youth culture “in the sixties represented both a rejection of the dominant culture in America and a peculiar reaffirmation of it at the same time” (221).  How was that so?

11. Describe the ways various political factions in the 1980s and 1990s came to understand the legacy of the counterculture and youth rebellion of the sixties.

Section A, Unger, chpt. 6, “The Counterculture”
1. What were some of the bohemian movements that emerged in the US before the 1960s? (Unger, 158-160). 

2. How did the young people interviewed in the first document come to find out about the Woodstock music fest?  What kinds of experiences did these individuals have while attending the event?

3. What does the document entitled “HIPpocrates” reveal about the lifestyle of hippies?

Section B
4. What happened at the Stonewall Inn on June 27, 1969?  How did onlookers react?

5. Explain the essence of the “psychedelic revolution” Timothy Leary hoped would change America.

Section C, Unger, chpt. 6 and Sally Thomlinson, “Psychedelic Rock Posters: History, Ideas, and Art,” in The Portable Sixties Reader (photocopied handout)
6. How did the two alternative press reports (pgs 184-190) describe the Summer of Love?  Judging from all three accounts, what kind of community was Haight-Ashbury?

7. The Bay Area rock scene of the mid to late 1960s was incredibly eclectic.  What were some of the influences driving the musicians and artists in San Francisco?  What do the posters of the era tell us about the spirit of the age?

8. Describe the mass public events held in an around San Francisco in the late sixties.

Section D, Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, “Eight Miles High: The Counter Culture,” in “Takin' It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader (photocopied handout) 
9. According to the introduction to the chapter “’Eight Miles High’: The Counterculture” (227-229) how would artists in the sixties try to influence politics? 

10. How did Gary Snyder and Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd make their faiths relevant to the sixties generation?

11. What was the appeal of the psychotropic drug LSD?  Who took it and why?

12. What did the communes of the late sixties and early seventies represent?  Why did they draw so many to them? (283-86)

Section A
1. Why did Paul Potter and the SDS stand in opposition to the Vietnam War in 1965?

2. What does David Farber mean when he suggest that the Vietnam conflict was much more complex than young radicals imagined?  Were left wing antiwar college students naïve?

3. What did victory in Vietnam mean for the Johnson administration?  Was victory achievable?  Why or why not?

4. Who fought the war in Vietnam?  Who was able to avoid the draft?  Why?

Section B
5. Farber writes that all “wars have their atrocities, but in Vietnam some Americans did things that cannot be forgotten” (152).  Was Vietnam, on this count, any worse than previous American wars?  If so, why?

6. How did President Johnson and the media, as Farber contends, lie “to the American people about both the nature and the development of the war[?]” (153)

7. Explain the development of the antiwar movement from the mid-1960s on.  How would the movement change over the years?

Set 18: Answer one question from each section.

Section A, Farber, chpt. 9, “Stormy Weather”
1. Describe some of the forces that influenced the SDS.  What drew so many college students together in the protest movement?

2. What were the goals of the Free Speech Movement?  What type of student did it attract?

Section B
3. David Farber writes that by the “late 1960s, many young black activists had lost faith in white society and preached a vague doctrine of revolutionary violence” (199). How did this change take place and what new movements emerged as a result?

4. How would the Black Panther Party come to symbolize the new “revolutionary black militancy”? (206)

Section C
5. Do you agree with Farber’s conclusion that radicals of the era “poisoned” American political life and weakened the antiwar movement? (211) 

Unger, chpt. 7, “The New Feminism”

6. Why do Debi and Irwin Unger write that of “all these ‘liberation movements,’ the New Feminism was the most significant”? (194)  Is this true?

7. What was the nameless “problem” Betty Freidan wrote about?  What did Freidan learn from her interviews with housewives?

8. What does the 1967 “NOW Bill of Rights” reveal about the growing women’s movement in the US?  What rights did NOW organizers demand?  Have those been achieved in the years since ’67?

Section D
9. Why did Anne Koedt address Sigmund Freud’s theory of vaginal orgasm?  Is this a minor point, an obscure issue of female anatomy?  Why or why not? 

10. How did Koedt and the authors of the “Redstockings Manifesto” (215) view male leadership and patriarchy? 

11. What were the issues at stake for the protesters of the 1968 Miss America Pageant?  What parallels existed between this movement and other liberation movements of the era?

1. In a review of Norman Mailer’s book in a 1968 issue of the New York Times, Wilfrid Sheed remarked that although Mailer “pays his compliments to the young people and the New Politics, his imagination is really grabbed by the vestiges of the old America: The God-bless-our-land world of small-town Republicans and jaunty turn-of-the-century corruption of unreformed Democrats.”  Give several examples of Mailer’s focus on old America.  Why would Mailer pay attention to a by-gone era? (Wilfrid Sheed, “Miami And the Siege Of Chicago,” New York Times, December 8, 1968, 477.)

2. In December, 1968, Peter Shaw reviewed Mailer’s book for Commentary Magazine.  Shaw proclaimed that “Norman Mailer is above all a novelist in this book of reportage because in it he writes, as always when at his best, about things that he has not yet made up his mind about.”  Is Shaw’s observation accurate?  Why or why not?
 
3. English professor James Shapiro has argued that “Mailer's America in the late 1960's was not so much hypocritical as ‘schizophrenic’: ‘a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a black,’ a nation filled with ‘patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers’ and with ‘citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled.’"  How does the theme of “schizophrenia” appear in Miami and the Siege of Chicago?  Considering the volatile state of American in 1968, is that a fitting theme?

4. Throughout Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer harbors many doubts about the activists and protestors.  Why would he finally choose to side, albeit with apprehension, with the demonstrators?

5. Does Norman Mailer’s writing style in Miami and the Siege of Chicago provide a clear or murky, accurate or inaccurate picture of the events of 1968?  Why or why not?