What you’ll learn to do: explain countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s

Figure 1. Students demonstrating in Washington, D.C. after the violence at Kent State University.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, groups of Native Americans, gay and lesbian people, and women worked to change discriminatory laws and pursue government support for their interests, a strategy known as identity politics. Others, disenchanted with mainstream society, distanced themselves from White, middle-class America by forming their own countercultures centered on a desire for peace, the rejection of material goods and traditional morality, concern for the environment, and drug use in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. These groups, whose aims and tactics posed a challenge to the existing state of affairs, often met hostility from individuals, local officials, and the U.S. government. Still, they persisted, determined to further their goals and secure for themselves the rights and privileges to which they were entitled as American citizens.