Review

General Books

This monograph is the latest addition to the Greenwood Press "Guides to Historic Events of the Twentieth Century," which examine significant American and international events ranging from World War I to The Watergate Crisis to The End of Apartheid in South Africa. McWilliams's The 1960s Cultural Revolution attempts to explain major forces shaping the tumultuous period from 1960 to approximately 1975 in the United States. He distills the multifarious activities of the era into what he considers the three most defining and dramatic phenomena–the New Left, the antiwar movement, and the counterculture. He argues that youth involved in these movements ultimately changed America in several important ways. Through their efforts in the Free Speech Movement and via organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, college students won greater freedom of political expression and advanced the ideal of participatory democracy. Their activism and protests challenged consensus politics by exposing the brutality and arrogance of American action in Vietnam and the suppression of civil rights for minorities and women. Some counterculture youth also questioned the values of American society and advocated alternative lifestyles based on communal living, drugs, and sexual freedom. By the end of the decade many "assumptions about life in America were turned upside down" and principles that had "guided American foreign policy were no longer relevant or valid" (p. 96). Therein lies the revolution. Yet McWilliams refutes the popular notion that the 1960s was an era solely dominated by radicalism. He also asserts that "the stereotypical notion that a small number of the younger generation represented the majority was more perception than reality" (p. 12). Although the media exaggerated the antics of protesters and hippies, most members of the baby boomer generation were "part of a silent majority" (p. 13), and mainstream youth shared more with the "establishment" than with their riotous counterparts. Most worked and played in traditional ways, did not participate in demonstrations, and remained largely unaffected by the sexual and cultural revolutions. Moreover, he points out that even the New Left, the antiwar movement, and the counterculture ultimately splintered for lack of coherent goals and leadership and most participants rejoined the American mainstream, which by the 1970s had adopted some of their ideals.	1
McWilliams provides a narrative synopsis of the 1960s and a variety of reference material, including a detailed time line, biographical sketches of key historical figures, primary documents associated with the movements in question, a glossary of terms, and an annotated bibliography. This volume is aimed at high school and college students and seeks to capitalize on student interest in the 1960s and to help them to understand some of the conflicting forces of the era. However, it breaks little new ground. Although McWilliams offers a partial corrective to many of the overly positive assessments of the 1960s movements, he provides only a few specifics on what the silent majority of Americans were indeed doing during the 1960s. Rather, he focuses on the protesters who may have been the minority but whose movements affected significant numbers Americans and deserve special scrutiny. He relies heavily on familiar sources (including textbooks as references) to synthesize material on the social and political movements and does not improve upon already existing monographs or documents collections. He also leaves out important issues. How can a book about the cultural revolution of the 1960s fail to discuss the civil rights movements and the women's movement? It seems the author avoided these issues to allow for other volumes in the Greenwood Press series to take them up. Granted each of the 1960s movements do warrant volumes of their own; nevertheless, a book claiming to guide students to an understanding of the forces that shaped the 1960s should include such major developments.	2
Teachers looking for a single book on the era will have to look elsewhere for a more comprehensive one. This volume could be useful in a course devoted entirely to the 1960s which also required additional monographs and discussions of the dynamics of that decade. Essays in this volume could also be compared with others on similar issues (such as those by William Chafe and Harvard Sitkoff's A History of Our Time; Terry Anderson's The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee; or Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage) to offer students an opportunity to analyze conflicting historical viewpoints and to discover their own.	3
California State University, Long Beach Donna M. Binkiewicz

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.