The Transatlantic Sixties: Europe and the United States in the Counterculture Decade

摘要

Fascination with the 1960s understandably stems from the wide range of political, social, economic, and cultural shifts of the decade which together have imbued these years with the rather broad characterization of the 'counterculture decade'. Whether through war, growing political activism, economic growth, shifts in the arts, fears regarding nuclear projects, or dramatic episodes of Cold War tension, the 1960s affected the lives of a wide range of people throughout the world. But whose decade was it? A product of the Erasmus Intensive Program's 2011 summer academy entitled 'Coming Together or Coming Apart: Europe and the United States in the 1960s', The Transatlantic Sixties is an interdisciplinary volume which speaks of this question by examining trans-Atlantic currents between America and Europe. In line with recent shifts in globalization studies, the essays within The Transatlantic Sixties attempt to move away from national models, 'to conceptualize larger shifts in historical consciousness'. Recent calls within American studies toward viewing the 1960s as a 'worlded decade', argue the volume's editors, are a welcome shift that 'disturb if not challenge notions of national distinctiveness'. To this end, the contributors examine the 1960s as a series of global events in an attempt to demonstrate how racism, discrimination, and social protest were not isolated national phenomena, but were intimately connected to broader postwar shifts in cultural perception.