Importance of the Counter Culter Concept in Understanding the Sixties

Importance of the Counter-Culture Concept in Understanding the Changes of the Sixties
Works Cited Not Included
There were many changes, shifts in ideas and movements during the
period of the Sixties, which may or not be easily defined by the term
counter-culture. It can be argued that there were changes at this
time which were a progression of earlier events over a long period of
time, and therefore cannot be defined to the Sixties; also some
changes appear to be more ideological than counter-cultural; and there
were also changes which could be considered a reaction to the
counter-culture itself, and therefore be considered counter
counter-cultural. I am going to discuss changes in History, Science
and Religion, in order to establish to what extent the concept of
counter-culture can be of use in this study of the Sixties.

By careful study of the Chronology in Resource Book 4, we discover
that changes were happening to the social climate from 1954 onwards.
In the USA, the fight for black civil rights and desegregation won a
victory in this year when segregation in public schools was pronounced
illegal in the Supreme Court. In the following year, the movement
accelerated when ‘Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white
man on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama, bus’, and in the same town
‘Martin Luther King leads a boycott of Montgomery buses’ (Resource
Book 4, p5). Also in 1955, in the UK, Mary Quant opened Bazaar in
London, indicating new ideas in fashion, and we have the beginnings of
commercial television. Soon after this we see the emergence of Elvis
Presley, and both ‘pop’ and modern ‘art’ exhibitions in London. There
was another victory for the civil rights movement, when ‘President
Eisenhower sends US army to Little Rock to enforce desegregation of
central high school’ (Resource Book 4, p6). Authors were beginning to
break the boundaries with novels, and after the New Obscene
Publications Act in...