This short overview of the United States hippie social movement examines hippie beliefs and practices.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s hundreds of thousands of white middle-class American youths suddenly became hippies. This short overview of the hippie social movement in the United States examines the movement's beliefs and practices, including psychedelic drugs, casual sex, and rock music, as well as the phenomena of spiritual seeking, hostility to politics, and communes. W. J. Rorabaugh synthesizes how hippies strived for authenticity, expressed individualism, and yearned for community. Viewing the tumultuous Sixties from a new angle, Rorabaugh shows how the counterculture led to subsequent social and cultural changes in the United States with legacies including casual sex, natural foods, and even the personal computer.

“Turn on, tune in, drop out,” Timothy Leary advised young people in the 1960s. And many did, creating a counterculture built on drugs, rock music, sexual liberation, and communal living. The hippies preached free love, promoted flower power, and cautioned against trusting anyone over thirty. Eschewing money, materialism, and politics, they repudiated the mainstream values of the times. Along the way, these counterculturists created a lasting legacy and inspired long-lasting social changes. The Hippies and American Values uses an innovative approach to exploring the tenets of the counterculture movement. Rather than relying on interviews conducted years after the fact, Timothy Miller uses “underground” newspapers published at the time to provide a full and in-depth exploration. This reliance on primary sources brings an immediacy and vibrancy rarely seen in other studies of the period. Miller focuses primarily on the cultural revolutionaries rather than on the political radicals of the New Left. It examines the hippies’ ethics of dope, sex, rock, community, and cultural opposition and surveys their effects on current American values. Filled with illustrations from alternative publications, along with posters, cartoons, and photographs, The Hippies and American Values provides a graphic look at America in the 1960s. This second edition features a new introduction and a thoroughly updated, well-documented text. Highly readable and engaging, this volume brings deep insight to the counterculture movement and the ways it changed America. The first edition became a widely used course-adoption favorite, and scholars and students of the 1960s will welcome the second edition of this thought-provoking book.

Introduction; The Ethics of Dope; The Ethics of Sex; The Ethics of Rock; The Ethics of Community; The Ethics of Cultural Opposition; Legacy

An insightful introduction to hippie culture and how its revolutionary principles in the 1960s helped shape modern culture. This title explores how hippies, and 1960s counterculture in general, developed and influenced popular culture in America. Covering the years between 1961 and 1972, this is the first volume focused exclusively on the emergence, growth, and lasting legacy of hippie culture, on everything from clothing, hair styles, and music to attitudes toward sex and drugs, and anti-war, anti-establishment activism. Hippies includes a chronology, topical chapters on hippie culture, biographies, primary documents, and a glossary. Coverage ranges from an examination of hippie involvement in drug use, politics, sexual behavior, and music, and a contemporary perspective on lasting impact of hippies on modern American life. Readers will encounter famous icons of the era, from Abbie Hoffman to Timothy Leary, while getting a real sense of what life inside the hippie counterculture was like.

Restricted to the shorthand of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” the counterculture would seem to be a brief, vibrant stretch of the 1960s. But the American counterculture, as this book clearly demonstrates, was far more than a historical blip and its impact continues to resonate. In this comprehensive history, Damon R. Bach traces the counterculture from its antecedents in the 1950s through its emergence and massive expansion in the 1960s to its demise in the 1970s and persistent echoes in the decades since. The counterculture, as Bach tells it, evolved in discrete stages and his book describes its development from coast to heartland to coast as it evolved into a national phenomenon, involving a diverse array of participants and undergoing fundamental changes between 1965 and 1974. Hippiedom appears here in relationship to the era’s movements—civil rights, women’s and gay liberation, Red and Black Power, the New Left, and environmentalism. In its connection to other forces of the time, Bach contends that the counterculture’s central objective was to create a new, superior society based on alternative values and institutions. Drawing for the first time on documents produced by self-described “freaks” from 1964 through 1973—underground newspapers, memoirs, personal correspondence, flyers, and pamphlets—his book creates an unusually nuanced, colorful, and complete picture of a time often portrayed in clichéd or nostalgic terms. This is the counterculture of love-ins and flower children, of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, but also of antiwar demonstrations, communes, co-ops, head shops, cultural feminism, Earth Day, and antinuclear activism. What Damon R. Bach conjures is the counterculture in all of its permutations and ramifications as he illuminates its complexity, continually evolving values, and constantly changing components and adherents, which defined and redefined it throughout its near decade-long existence. In the long run, Bach convincingly argues that the counterculture spearheaded cultural transformation, leaving a changed America in its wake.