DIVTelevision of the 60s and its attempts to deal with youth culture./div

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.

Caricatures of sixties television--called a "vast wasteland" by the FCC president in the early sixties--continue to dominate our perceptions of the era and cloud popular understanding of the relationship between pop culture and larger social forces. Opposed to these conceptions, The Revolution Wasn't Televised explores the ways in which prime-time television was centrally involved in the social conflicts of the 1960s. It was then that television became a ubiquitous element in American homes. The contributors in this volume argue that due to TV's constant presence in everyday life, it became the object of intense debates over childraising, education, racism, gender, technology, politics, violence, and Vietnam. These essays explore the minutia of TV in relation to the macro-structure of sixties politics and society, attempting to understand the struggles that took place over representation the nation's most popular communications media during the 1960s.

This volume contains essays on Arthur Penn's film Bonnie and Clyde.

Critics and defenders alike connect today's widespread anxieties about sexuality and culture to the political activism of the 1960s and the counterculture's preoccupation with the individual pursuit of pleasure. In contrast, the essays in Swindling Single attribute the new sexual mores of that era not to its political upheavals but to a confluence of social, cultural, and economic factors that encouraged personal gratification and altered traditionally defined gender roles. Contributors analyze a broad range of topics: the commercialization of avant-garde and exploitation films; new visions of female sexuality in That Girl and The Avengers; the social context of such cultural icons as Hugh Hefner and Charles Manson; the intersection of race and sexuality in Eldridge Cleaver's Soul oil Ice; and depictions of sexual pleasure in pornography and scientific films.

Starting with the premise that it is possible to say something significantly new about the 1960s and the New Left, the contributors to this volume trace the social roots, the various paths, and the legacies of the movement that set out to change America. As members of a younger generation of scholars, none of them (apart from Paul Buhle) has first-hand knowledge of the era. Their perspective as non-participants enables them to offer fresh interpretations of the regional and ideological differences that have been obscured in the standard histories and memoirs of the period. Reflecting the diversity of goals, the clashes of opinions, and the tumult of the time, these essays will engage seasoned scholars as well as students of the '60s.