A&M.001.VIKING BOER – MUSIC – CULTURE – THE 1960s REBELLIONS

[VIKING BOER]

A&M.001.VIKING BOER – MUSIC – CULTURE – THE 1960s REBELLIONS

It Was The Stultifying 1950s That Provoked The 1960s Rebellions

As many of my subscribers know, I have spent many years of my professional career filming Americans raising children in the 1950s and 1960s or who were children during those decades. Although I started my career in 1963, I immediately began recording films from my own upbringing. I also assembled a very large archive of films that I acquired rights to back oi the 1970s and 1980s.

All of this content allowed me to make a six-part television series for PBS in 1990 that was titled Making Sense of the Sixties. At the time that it first aired, it was very popular but controversial. I chose to focus on the social movements and attitudes of the baby boomers and not the political activities of the day.

I was interested in how young people and their parents felt about their lives back then rather than who was the president or what laws Congress passed etc. That was what was criticized by some. What was complimented was my focus on social behaviors and habits. Clothing. Music. Rebellions — Little ones and big ones. Drugs. Etc.

Some of those who comment on my video clips posted on YouTube say they would like to go back to the 1950s. A fairly large proportion of them was not alive at that time but even some of those who were have, in my view, a fantasy about what that was like back then. My series focuses on the rising middle class, tens of millions of Americans, mostly white, who moved into the suburbs, and on black Americans during the heyday of the civil rights era.

It is titled Seeds Of The Sixties. With the time I had available, I did not focus on the experience that every American had at that time. I chose to focus largely on two groups of Americans. The white Americans in the hugely rising middle class and the black Americans who were living in a largely segregated society at the start of the decade.

The people speaking in the series except for a few well-known people are mostly ordinary American citizens and researchers who spent their days studying how young people and the parents of teenagers felt at that time. The powerful economy. The availability of jobs. Dr. Spock. What schools were like in the 1950s. Segregation. Civil rights. What students were taught in school about the American dream and about American democracy.

If you are watching this you may not agree with everything in it as it may not present your experience or the experience your ancestors had. Given the size of suburban America at that time, tens of millions of people, it does present a first-hand experience that, in some form or other, many Americans had.

Many 1950s parents grew up in the depression and went through World War II, and their children, some of them grew up satisfied with things as they were and others, about 40% or more of the baby boom generation, were unsatisfied with the stories they were being told from their parents, from their churches, from the educators, versus what they were seeing and feeling in the society they were growing up in.
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