Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960's and 70's [Paperback]

P. Braunstein (Author), Michael William Doyle (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415930405 | ISBN-13: 978-0415930406 | Publication Date: October 21, 2001

Amidst the recent flourishing of Sixties scholarship, Imagine Nation is the first collection to focus solely on the counterculture. Its fourteen provocative essays seek to unearth the complexity and rediscover the society-changing power of significant movements and figures.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This deep and detailed work examines the many elements of the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Its underlying theme is the rejection by mainly young but also older people of prevailing political, social, and cultural norms through experimentation with drugs, sex, music, and identity to construct alternative ways of life. The 14 essays, written by academics and journalists, are arranged into sections covering cultural politics, racial and sexual identity, the media and popular culture, the deconditioning of the human mind through drugs and feminist consciousness-raising, and alternative visions of society based on technology and communal living. Each section opens with a brief essay covering the major themes appearing in its chapters. Editors Braunstein and Doyle, who are both journalists, open the work with an excellent essay critical of both romantic and conservative views of the 1960s and stressing the need for strict historical analysis for a better understanding of the period. Particularly good essays include David Farber's study of drug use and David E. James's chapter on film. This is not an easy read, but it marks a major reexamination of the period. A good complement to The Sixties: From Meaning to History (Univ. of North Carolina, 1994) and Sights on the Sixties (Rutgers Univ., 1992. reprint); recommended for academic libraries. Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ., Parkersburg
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

...a historically sound survey of US counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. All 13 new essays... are of unusually uniform quality and together offer a genuinely helpful, if not entirely satisfactory, overview...Strongly recommended for all academic collections. -- CHOICE, November 2002
...a landmark study. -- Theodore Roszak, San Francisco Chronicle
...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
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 theture centrality of subcultures in American history since the the 1950s. -- Alice Echols, Author of Shaky Ground: Thests. Sixties and Its Aftershocks.
How thrilling to see the maelstrom of the Sixties subjectedd to trenchant analysis and its various ideologies andous expressions compared and contrasted. Thesetrasted. 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,the Actor and Writer, Author of Sleeping Where I Fall.
Imagine Nation is a much-needed antidote to the commodification of the '60s and '70s. Today's twenty-something politicos are quick to embrace the era's iconic images, long hair and mini skirts, Afros and peace signs, but not their deeper historical meanings. The essays here give us the meaning, the stories, the politics behind the culture, and offer insights into creating new countercultures for our time and place. -- Robin D.G. Kelley, Author of Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!
Imagine Nation is a juicy evocation of the Sixties, a decadethat can never be recovered, only imagined-and this book imagines well. -- Richard Goldstein, Executive Editor, The Village Voice
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.
Imagine Nation is a juicy evocation of the Sixties, a decade that can never be recovered, only imagined-and this book imagines well. -- Richard Goldstein, Executive Editor, The Village Voice
Imagine Nation is a much-needed antidote to the commodification of the '60s and '70s. Today's twenty-something politicos are quick to embrace the era's iconic images, long hair and mini skirts, Afros and peace signs, but not their deeper historical meanings. The essays here give us the meaning, the stories, the politics behind the culture, and offer insights into creating new countercultures for our time and place. -- Robin D.G. Kelley, Author of Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!
A dozen or so brainiacs have produced Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & '70s (Routledge), edited by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle. It methodically repudiates the lame canards that the social and political movements of the '60s were undemocratic or merely self-indulgent. Quite the opposite; they were animated by justice and communitarianism, and a direct response to everything from segregation and Vietnam to conformity and artlessness. -- High Times, Michael Simmons
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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (October 21, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415930405
• ISBN-13: 978-0415930406
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #97,025 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A HAPPENING - Bittersweet Adolescence of a Nation, July 24, 2002

By 

Pam Hanna "wind star" (Thoreau, New Mexico United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960's and 70's (Paperback)

This book took me weeks to read, not because it was dull but because the copious footnotes at the end of each of the 14 excellent essays demanded investigation. The essays complement one another to present a more complete and cogent view of the antecedents and realities of the counterculture than any other volume I have yet seen on the subject.

Counterculture names, say Braunstein and Doyle, "...hippies, freaks, Flower Children, urban guerillas, orphans of Amerikka - underscores the degree to which Sixties cultural radicals had a revolving-door approach to identity, appropriating and shedding roles and personas at a dizzying pace." In these pages, the roles and personas in cultural politics, race, sex, the media (especially music, film and fashion), drugs, feminism, environmentalism and alternative visions of community and technology are thoroughly investigated.

"Unlike subcultures," says Marilyn Young in the foreword, "...a contraculture aspires to transform values and mores of its host culture. If it is successful...it BECOMES the dominant culture." I don't believe anyone would maintain that the counterculture of the '60s has become dominant, but its influence on our present culture is more vast and all-encompassing than much of the media would have us believe.

"The Sixties were centrally about the recognition on the part of an ever-growing number of Americans, that the country in which they thought they lived - peaceful, generous, honorable - did not exist and never had." The society they found themselves in was instead, "...morally bankrupt, racist, militaristic, and culturally stultifying."

Against the climate of the VietNam war and race riots in the South, these essays note that the era was one of post-scarcity abundance. Intentional poverty was adopted consciously by a generation that was appalled by the waste of human and material resources. They wanted to figure out how to "...live a completely new life as far outside the boundaries of the State and commercial marketplace as they could get." Dropouts could live on the leftovers of this affluent society.

The San Francisco Diggers' motto was "create the condition you describe." Says Doyle, "For the Diggers, the word "free" was as much an imperative as it was an adjective. They realized it with free housing, legal services, a medical clinic, film screenings, concerts, free [open]churches, and free stores with food, clothes and household utensils - all donated and gathered from the surrounding community. The Mime Troupe and other street theater groups drew people in to create "happenings," freaking freely on the streets and in public parks, de-legitimizing violence and racism, while the White Panthers staged a "total assault on the culture." Peacefully.

"If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable," said JFK, and his words reverberate across cultural boundaries today. But hippies didn't WANT to become the next coercive power structure in some kind of psychedelic fascism. They wanted a "free frame of reference."

Braunstein observes that the post-scarcity abundance of the era fueled a new drive toward leisure and play. Against a system of "...lifelong competitiveness, materialism and avarice"...LSD and other mind-expanding drugs "...incapacitated the discriminating faculties of the brain that placed objects and images in hierachcies of value." David Farber adds that LSD and other hallucinogens were used as "...an agent in the production of cultural reorientation...a new set of cultural coordinates."

My only beef with the book is in Philip Deloria's "Counterculture Indians and the New Age" and it's not even a criticism of the essay (which I found among the most brilliant and absorbing) but of scholarly research in general. From personal knowledge, I know that there are egregious errors in what Deloria's sources reported about New Buffalo and Lorian. Scholarly research breaks down when such sources are trusted, and Deloria gives an excellent example of this in the much-repeated death speech of Chief Seattle - who never uttered it. It was written by a white screenwriter from Texas for a 1972 TV script on pollution. Hippies and New Agers reinvented Indians without careful reference to the source. And of course the image became marketable.

"Playing Indian," says Deloria, "...had a tendency to lead one into, rather than out of, contradiction and irony" and "...people are simultaneously granted a platform and rendered voiceless."

In his excellent essay on communes, Timothy Miller notes that they were "...enormously, endlessly diverse." "The ultimate culprit, perhaps, was that sacred American icon, individualism. The time had come, communitarians believed, to give up the endless pursuit of self-interest and begin thinking about the common good. They wanted the country to start moving from I to we. It all added up to a vision of nothing less than a new society. The new communitarians were out to save the world and made no bones about it."

Miller's essay segues nicely into the last - on alternative technolgy, environment and the counterculture by Andrew Kirk. Buckminster Fuller's geodescic domes were used extensively in the Drop City commune in Colorado as well as "...composting toilets, afforadble greenhouses, and organic gardening techniques along with alternative energy technologies." And don't forget that the first computer hackers, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were longhairs who smoked grass.

It's not that there were no mistakes, ineptitudes and downright stupidities in this deliberately unorganized "happening" of the '60s and '70s, but that what was good about it is still good. We're still out there. Here. Hippies didn't disappear and they didn't become corporate CEO's either. Instead, nearly all became teachers, health care workers, artists, organic farmers, social works and the like. "Cultural creatives" of the present, for instance, are either hippies of yesteryear or their heirs in some way.

"They are still out there, well into a third generation, coming together by the tens of thousands once a year at the Rainbow Gatherings. The hallucinogenic age, while tamed in some respects, has survived and mutated and reproduced."

This is the closest thing to the WHOLE STORY" that I've seen yet. Put it on your reference book shelf. ...

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Book Of Essays On The Counterculture!, January 14, 2004

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960's and 70's (Paperback)

One of the most fascinating artifacts arising in the midst of the turbulent 1960s was the creation and promulgation of a new subculture in the shadow of the mainstream material culture, one that had quite different aspects to its lifestyle, including a different set of predominating social, economic and political perspectives, experiences, and perspectives. In the main the thrust of the counterculture, as it came to be known, was a rabid rejection of the ethos, perspectives, and behaviors of the mainstream culture, including its meaningless materialism, its warlike nature, and its xenophobia about anyone different. In this terrific book edited by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, we are presented with fourteen wonderful essays written by scholarly eyewitnesses to the phenomenon.

These are arranged into several sections according to chapters dealing with popular culture, the media, the use of drugs to free oneself of predominating cultural baggage, social and cultural politics, and race, sex, and communal issues. Each of the sections is prefaced with a brief but integrating essay that helps immeasurably to both connect the subject of each chapter to the rest of the welter of considerations concerning the counterculture, and to help to explain various aspects concerning themes with the subject itself. The editors aid the overall effort by stitching together such important elements as the predominating "geist' or worldview of the members of the counterculture that helps to better locate them both historically and culturally within the particular and relatively brief moment in time that enveloped the counterculture itself. Yet another scholarly aspect of the book that makes it worthwhile is its extensive footnoting, which provocatively slows the reader down to enjoy the depth of the ride as well as to invite the reader in the direction of further reading and cogitation.

The opening section of the book is comprised of a wonderful essay that both locates the fourteen other essays in terms of the popular philosophy that so actively fueled the movement away from the predominating mainstream material culture, and points out how beneficial further historical analysis would be to further explicate the ways in which the sudden explosion of the counterculture onto the social scene in the late 1960s actively changed the society and continue to influence it today. This is a we'll-written and entertaining read that helps the reader to understand what other authors have simply explained away as being nothing more than "Sex, drugs, and rock and roll". For those of us who lived through it, it was so much more, and this book gives one a glimpse of everything the counterculture was, and all that it aspired unsuccessfully to become. Enjoy!

5.0 out of 5 stars Great read, January 1, 2012

By 

César Chávez "Tax the Rich... free the poor." (Amsterdam) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960's and 70's (Paperback)

14 essays written by different academics, covering a wide variety of topics pertaining to the radical counterculture of the '60's. Don't be intimidated by the fact that the book is written by professors; if you graduated high school you'll be able to read it, and you'll wish this type of fascinating history was covered in those boring high school social studies classes you dreaded. While it's also fun to read the hazy memories of '60's participants, this book is unique in that facts have been documented with footnotes. Do not let this lead you to believe, however, that footnotes = boring, dry reading... not true in this case.