No decade in the last 75 years has had a more profound impact on American culture than the 1960s. It inaugurated a counter-culture that is still with us today in the way we talk, dress and the music we listen to; it fashioned a youth culture with its own distinctive sensibility (as expressed by the word "cool"); it challenged habits of deference to authority and social conventions of all kinds (most notably, sexuality). This course will begin with the Civil Rights movement, which confronted institutionalized racism and served as the inspiration for new forms of participatory democracy. From there we will follow the emergence of the student left from its early, hopeful beginnings as articulated in the Port Huron Statement--which sought to enlist college students in a broad-based coalition of political activists--to the increasingly fractious and fractured New Left as it moved from "protest to resistance" and even to revolution. That trajectory was punctuated by a number of key episodes like the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, the "March on the Pentagon," the occupation of Columbia in '68, the protests against the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the subsequent violence of the Weather Underground--all of which we will examine in an attempt to understand why the politics of hope turned so resolutely to the "Days of Rage." We will also explore the accompanying cultural revolution which ultimately abandoned the politics of the New Left and sought more personalized forms of enlightenment that included LSD, communes, and other experiments in living. Join us for what promises to be a groovy semester.