After the Sixties: Activism in Disenchanted Times

Are the 1970s and 1980s really history? Over the past ten years, the era has undergone a strange alchemy, placing it into the realm of scholarship. Archives are opening, oral histories are being taken down before the key participants pass away, and undergraduate history classes are populated—all of a sudden—by people who were born during the Clinton years. Yet the immediacy of a time so recently past can make it hard to gain perspective on the way that contemporaries understood their world, while still recognizing it as something distinct from our own moment.