The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s remains a highly controversial and divisive topic. In assessing its impact on American life, critics on the right complain of the shattering of cherished social norms, while those on the left take many movements to task for not going far enough and selling out. "Imagine Nation" is a collection of essays, focusing solely on the counterculture, which seeks to unearth the complexity and rediscover the society-changing power of significant movements and figures. The topics covered include feminism, psychedelic drug experimentation, guerrilla theatre, the New Left, Jimi Hendrix, communal living, underground comics, and avant-garde film.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Marilyn B. Young Introduction: Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle Section 1: Deconditioning Section Introduction 1. The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation: Drugs in the Sixties Counterculture David Farber 2. From "Consciousness Expansion" to "Consciousness Raising": Feminism and the Countercultural Politics of the Self Debra Michals Section 2: Cultural Politics Section Introduction 3. Staging the Revolution: Guerrilla Theater as a Countercultural Practice, 1965-68 Michael William Doyle 4. "The Revolution Is About Our Lives": The New Left's Counterculture Doug Rossinow 5. The White Panthers' "Total Assault on the Culture" Jeff A. Hale Section 3: Identity 6. Counterculture Indians and the New Age Philip Deloria 7. Voodoo Child: Jimi Hendrix and the Politics of Race in the Sixties Lauren Onkey 8. Gay Gatherings: Reimagining the Counterculture Robert McRuer Section 4: Pop Culture and Mass Media Section Introduction 9. Forever Young: Insurgent Youth and the Sixties Culture of Rejuvenation Peter Braunstein 10. "The Movies Are a Revolution": Film and the Counterculture David E. James 11. Sex as a Weapon: Underground Comix and the Paradox of Liberation Beth Bailey Section 5: Alternative Visions Section Introduction 12. The Sixties-Era Communes Timothy Miller 13. "Machines of Loving Grace": Alternative Technology, Environment, and the Counterculture Andrew Kirk Contributors Index

About the Author

Peter Braunstein is a journalist and cultural historian based in New York City. He writes about fashion, film, celebrity, the 1960s, music, technology, and pop culture for such publications as the Village Voice, Forbes, American Heritage, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Women's Wear Daily, W, and culturefront. He received his M.A. from New York University in 1992, having written a thesis on the Haight-Ashbury counterculture. Michael William Doyle worked in the new-wave food co-op movement during the 1970s while living communally on an organic farm he helped found in Wisconsin. He went on to earn a B.A. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1989), and a Ph.D. at Cornell University (1997). He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Ball State University at Muncie, Indiana. He is the author of Free Radicals: The Haight-Ashbury Diggers and the American Counterculture in the 1960s.

Reviews

"Braunstein (journalist and independent scholar) and Doyle (Ball State Univ.) offer a historically sound survey of US counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s...Many of the chapters are likely to become assigned reading in courses on cultural history. Strongly recommended for all academic collections.."
-K. Toloyan, Wesleyan University, for "CHOICE
..."a landmark study."
-Theodore Roszak, "San Francisco Chronicle, December 23, 2001
..."the essays do a fine job of showing the ways in which women, blacks, American Indians and gays lived out the full implications of challenging the subliminal assumptions of mainstream culture."
-Theodore Roszak, "San Francisco Chronicle, December 23, 2001
"" Imagine Nation is an important corrective to the now-fashionable view that the counterculture represented little more than the further commodification of American society. This provocative collection helps to reveal the centrality of subcultures in American history since the the 1950s."
- Alice Echols, Author of "Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks.
"How thrilling to see the maelstrom of the Sixties subjected to trenchant analysis and its various ideologies and expressions compared and contrasted. These scholar-detectives are so sensitive to the mind of the times that I suspect many saw action on the same streets I and my friends did. I think they got it right.."
-Peter Coyote, Actor and Writer, Author of" Sleeping Where I Fall.