...t in academic historical discourse. Today, it seems appropriate to consider this shift and look again at how the history of foreign conflict is taught. The schools of social and radical history that attained prominence in the 1960s had been especially marginalized in the decade before. This fact is not insignificant: disillusionment with Cold War “consensus history” had a profound impact on the development of oppositional history in the decades t...
...t Kingdom occupied my life this summer, as a rotating cast of hippies told me stories of the quick dissolution of utopian dreams and harmonious anarchism into destructive drug and alcohol addiction—a physical manifestation of 1960s idealism morphing into 1970s excess. With philosophers and scientists warning us that humans cannot continue on their path of destruction, young people, myself included, are flocking to organic farms and homesteads onc...
...gration remains relatively ungendered. Women are, to be fair, implicitly addressed in the “anchor babies” discussion, but in a negative light that recalls the sensational reporting on welfare fraud that began during the early 1960s. This concept of a welfare queen was introduced then to refer to a mother who collected welfare payments through fraud or manipulation. The catchphrase ran: “welfare queens driving in welfare Cadillacs.” Franklin Gilli...
...w do you react to that analogy? BM: I think there’s probably something to it. I think what’s interesting about the climate movement is that many of the young people involved are not ideological in the sense that people in the 1960s seemed to be. I don’t know many people who are trying to restructure all the world’s ways and economies and things. […] In certain ways, [it’s] quite a conservative one [movement]. It’s aimed at things from changing to...
...g opinion in the obscenity case of Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964): explained his reluctance to define “hard-core pornography” Stewart wrote, “I know it when I see it.” But the “pornographies” Stewart saw and knew to be such in the 1960s are now relics of what may be viewed as a more sensitive American temperament regarding sexuality. Mainstream movies like the Midnight Cowboy (which won Best Picture in 1969) and Last Tango in Paris (1972) pushed the s...
...s advanced too slowly, but at least it’s on the record. That Waltz wants to buck the trend is beyond me. He even ignores another piece of history: Israel is not the only country to have had a regional nuclear monopoly. In the 1960s, South Africa began a nuclear weapons program that ultimately left it with six bombs. And, in the ‘90s, it was the first country to voluntarily disarm. Rather than calling for a nuclear Iran, maybe Waltz could put Isra...
Illustration by Justin Walker The Obama campaign’s direct and wide-scale efforts to mobilize the public in 2008 resulted in voter turnout rates unheard of since the 1960s. However, a report released by the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University predicts that there will be a drop in voter turnout for the 2012 elections due to political disenchantment among young voters. As the report summarizes, “Obama the preside...
...our up towards the site of the current Manhattanville construction. The tour was led by co-founder of the coalition and Columbia College alum Tom Kappner, who has lived in the Morningside Heights-Harlem neighborhood since the 1960s. The walking tour featured six stops, featuring familiar places and faces of the tension between neighborhood residents and the university. The first stop was in front of Teacher’s College, where Kappner recounted Colu...
...system have populations that are 70 percent a single race; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic.” Despite efforts over the years, schools are even more segregated than they were in the 1960s, according to Gary Orfield, an education professor at UCLA. According to Arne Duncan, increasing universal access to quality education “is the civil rights issue of our generation.” Failing to do so would threaten econ...
...sh sovereignty over Northern Ireland, and Irish Catholic Republicans, who desire a united Ireland, are unsurprising, given the flawed nature of the peace agreement that brought the conflict to an official close. From the late 1960s until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, intense sectarian violence between Irish Catholics and British Protestants claimed three thousand lives, a period known as the “Troubles.” Most Northern Irish identified with Brita...
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