Counterculture of the 1960s

A youth-led movement that challenged mainstream values through experimentation in lifestyle, music, politics, spirituality, and opposition to the Vietnam War.

Hippie: A participant in a 1960s youth movement associated with communal living, nonconformity, and experimentation. Hippies became the counterculture’s most visible figures and style.
Woodstock: A 1969 music festival in Bethel, New York, attended by hundreds of thousands of people. Its scale and imagery came to represent the counterculture’s musical community.
Beat Generation: A postwar literary and cultural movement that rejected conformity and explored spirituality, sexuality, and spontaneous expression. Beat writers supplied earlier models of nonconformity and alternative living.
Timothy Leary: An American psychologist and advocate of psychedelic drugs who became a prominent countercultural figure. His promotion of psychedelic experience made him a widely recognized movement spokesman.
Silent Generation: The generation born roughly between the mid-1920s and mid-1940s, preceding the baby boomers. Its older cohort provides a generational contrast to the youth-led movement.
Summer of Love: A 1967 gathering of young people in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, associated with hippie culture. It made the counterculture’s communal ideals internationally visible.
San Francisco Sound: A psychedelic rock style associated with San Francisco bands of the 1960s. Its experimental music gave the movement a distinctive regional sound.
Baby boomers: The generation born during the sharp rise in births following World War II. Its large cohort supplied much of the movement’s young adult population.
Abbie Hoffman: An American political activist and co-founder of the Youth International Party, known for theatrical protest. His performance-based activism turned countercultural dissent into political spectacle.
New Left: A diverse political movement of the 1960s that emphasized participatory democracy and social change. It overlapped with the counterculture but centered more explicitly on political organization.

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