The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974

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PREPUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT

The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974 documents the key events, trends, and movements in 1960s America— vividly conveying the zeitgeist of the decade and its effects into the middle of the next. Alongside 75,000 pages of letters, diaries, and oral histories, there are more than 75,000 pages of posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, and rare audio and video materials—150,000 pages total upon completion. The collection is further enhanced by dozens of scholarly document projects, featuring richly annotated primary-source content that is analyzed and contextualized through interpretive essays by leading historians.

Freedom rides, sit-ins, the draft, the Equal Rights Amendment, Earth Day, the Free Speech Movement, the Stonewall riots, Woodstock, the Summer of Love, the Space Race…The events of the Sixties tested and defined the core values of America. But despite our familiarity with names, dates, and basic facts, there has been no single, comprehensive resource for study in this area. With The Sixties, researchers will now have personal accounts by the people who experienced events firsthand, searchable together with important and rare audio, video, and historical documents.

RELEVANCE TO SCHOLARSHIP

Much of the content in The Sixties is previously unpublished, ephemeral, or hard to access. In many instances culled from small local and personal archives, the materials identify the spirit of the era across place and time—particularly important for locations that have escaped popular study until now. Users will learn about student activism not just in Berkeley and New York City, but also across the Midwest and the South, in universities both urban and rural. Many of the materials are held in small and widely dispersed collections, inaccessible except onsite and yet essential for a comprehensive understanding of how social changes and movements affected people across the U.S. of all races, classes, and genders.

Dozens of documentary videos and short films—the rightwing film Anarchy, U.S.A; SNCC’s advocacy film We’ll Never Turn Back; The Language of Faces, a pacifist plea produced by the Quakers; the conservative investigation Communists on Campus—give emotional immediacy to the social conflicts that dominated the era. Other videos offer intimate views of everyday life—young adults in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park on a Sunday afternoon; African American teens discussing what it means to be black, young, and socially aware in a time of Black Nationalism and overt racism; and young people in small-town coffeehouses.

SOURCES AND THEMES

Carefully crafted under the guidance of our editorial advisors—led by Alexander Bloom of Wheaton College, editor of Takin’ It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader (Oxford University Press, 1995)—the content touches on a broad range of themes including Civil Rights; the Vietnam War; the New Left and emerging neo-conservatism; the environmental movement; the women’s movement and second-wave feminism; gay and lesbian activism; student activism; the media; arts, music, and leisure; the counter-culture; and technological changes. 

The emerging bibliography of target archives includes the American Radicalism Collection at the University of Michigan; the Chicago Film Archives; the Robert Russa Moton Museum of Prince Edward County, Virginia; the Lydia T. Wright papers at the University Archives, State University of New York at Buffalo; guides to school desegregation in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi located at Emory University; the New Left Movement Collection at Trent University Archives; the Civil Rights Collection of Nashville Public Library; and the Pacifica Radio Archives. 

ALEXANDER STREET'S SEMANTIC INDEXING™

Alexander Street’s deep, semantic indexing offers more than twenty combinable search fields. Scholars can locate ephemeral material, audio and video, or specific sections within books or narratives; identify particular historical events, places, or notable people; and analyze all the content in ways previously impossible.  Questions like these can now be answered from a single search screen: 

• How did white and black student attitudes towards school integration efforts differ in Northern and Southern locations?

• What were the most frequent topics of discussion in women’s consciousness-raising groups?

• How did student leaders view the role of popular music in their activism?

• How did the theories and methods of Chicano activism differ from other civil rights movements?

DOCUMENT PROJECTS FOR CONTEXTUAL UNDERSTANDING

The collection not only provides a rich trove of primary documents but also contextualizes the documents, through more than fifty essays created exclusively for The Sixties by leading historians. Assembled around a major theme or research question, each document project presents selected annotated primary-source documents and links them with an interpretive essay, historical context, and scholarly commentary. Collectively these document projects constitute a notable body of historical scholarship for advanced researchers, while also serving to introduce students to methods in primary-source research.

PUBLICATION DETAILS

The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974 will be available on the Web in late 2008. The database is available through one-time purchase of perpetual rights or annual subscription, with prices scaled to library type and budget. Please contact sales@alexanderstreet.com or your sales representative to arrange for a free trial, request prepublication pricing details, and to learn about the other collections in our Social and Cultural History series.