Do You Remember the Sixties?: The Scholarship of Resistance and Rebellion

According to the now-familiar adage, if you remember the Sixties, you probably weren't there. Nevertheless, for quite some time individuals have attempted to chronicle the history of this period and analyze its significance and legacy. Until recently, academic work on the subject has been undertaken primarily by participants in the movements that purportedly comprise the Sixties and has focused almost exclusively on the student movement in the United States; the Sixties has traditionally been tied directly to the American Students for a Democratic Society (sds) and its history has been written as a combination of personal reminiscence and archival research.¹ As such, a particular narrative about the era has emerged that largely excludes non-American forms of political and social activism along with activities before 1960 and after 1969. This story contends that the activism associated with the Sixties began in the early 1960s as very small and relatively conservative, became, especially after 1968, increasingly large, radical, and confrontational, and ultimately fractured and dissolved shortly thereafter in response to ideological divisions, unresolved contradictions, and the rise of new movements rooted in identity politics.²

Recently, however, scholarship on the Sixties has expanded dramatically and various academics have challenged existing assumptions in order to tell a different story. British historians, for example, now portray the so-called New Left as an intellectual movement that emerged from the Communist Party and included an older generation of political radicals rather than simply young people or students. It began, they argue, in 1956 when many individuals abandoned the Communist Party in reaction to revelations regarding Stalin's purges and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and it continued through to at least the mid-1970s when political activism entered into a period of decline.³ Similarly, American New Left historian Van Gosse insists that the Sixties should be conceived of as a wider collection of social movements that all share a commitment to a radical form of democracy and a questioning of Cold War liberalism and would extend from the end of World War II until the 1970s,⁴ while Arthur Marwick attempts to chronicle various events and activities in Britain, France, and Italy, as well as the United States, in an effort to expand the narrative of the period.⁵ In addition, a significant number of early career scholars and graduate students who did not live through the period have initiated a wide range of studies on the period and, with the benefit of distance and space, have begun to construct a different narrative.⁶ Nonetheless, while academics seek to explore and explain the complexities of the Sixties, conceptions of the era continue to be dominated by the narrative of the American student movement.

New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness demonstrates the recent popularity of the Sixties and highlights some of the new directions being taken by academics from a number of different fields. It emerged from a conference held at Queen's University in June 2007, which brought together approximately four hundred participants to discuss the meanings and legacies of the era from a global and interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, conference organizers asked how the story of the Sixties might change if the focus shifted "away from the main centres and major events that have thus far dominated representations of the period." (2) As such, the book that emerged from this event is intentionally broad, both thematically and geographically; it includes contributions on politics, culture, and gender and the efforts and experiences of individuals and groups from all around the world. Overall, while the editors resist the temptation to tell a singular story about the time and its actors, emphasizing instead its complexities, they nevertheless argue that the articles demonstrate that "the challenges that citizens made to...