![]() There is much to this view, particularly when we think globally, as the authors were doing. There are ways, nonetheless, to try to apprehend the entire picture, though doing so necessarily depends on one’s willingness to work in broad strokes.Ĭarole Fink and her colleagues argued in the 1998 book A World Transformed that the upheaval was a protest against the Cold War order. So maybe the way to understand 1968 is simply to note that many powerful forces came together at the same time and leave it at that. An edited volume explaining why crises erupted almost simultaneously around the world. Social scientists diagnosed America’s social and cultural ills as evidence of an epidemic of alienation. The urban crisis, which itself developed from several different mid-century developments, also was causal, and while it was indisputably connected to the racial crisis, those two forces also were independent of each other.Īt the time, many Americans believed that the “generation gap” was triggering campus uprisings, antiwar agitation, and urban riots. after riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. A soldier standing guard in Washington, D.C. The Vietnam War and the nation’s racial nightmare stand out as the most obvious underlying causes of tumult, but they were coincidental, not interrelated.Ī 1967 protest against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. The sheer number of convulsive “happenings,” to misuse a word from the day, suggests that the undercurrents driving events were wide and deep. Who remembers the assassination of John Gordon Mein, the American ambassador to Guatemala, in August, on the very day the Democrats imploded in Chicago? Some events seem as though they ought to be memorable but don’t show up on anyone’s lists. The theatrical poster for the Night of the Living Dead ( left). John Gordon Mein, the American ambassador to Guatemala ( right). “Hair” premiered, as did “Night of the Living Dead,” which could probably rise to a B-list if treated as an allegory for the times-surely more suitable for it than for “Hair.”ĭenny McClain won 31 games for the Detroit Tigers, which only Detroiters would rate as historically important, though he remains major league baseball’s last 30-game winner. The Fifth Dimension won a Grammy for “Up, Up, and Away.” The Big Mac was introduced to a then-svelte public. With its pictorial retrospective, USA Today reminded me that a number of things could make up C- and D-lists. President Lyndon Johnson with members of the Kerner Commission in 1967 ( right). The B-list included the passage of the Fair Housing Act, the third important civil-rights measure of the Sixties, the publication of the Kerner Commission report on urban disorders, and Black Power protests on the Olympic medal stand in Mexico City.Ī 1964 protest against housing discrimination in Seattle, Washington ( left). ![]() Then came Nixon, who implausibly offered to “bring us together.” In August, the Democratic Party melted down in Chicago. Columbia University came under siege in late April and early May. Richard Nixon giving his “victory” sign at a 1968 campaign rally in Pennsylvania ( right).Ī string of urban rebellions erupted after King’s death Kennedy’s brought almost stunned silence as a mourning train delivered his casket from New York to Washington. Marines in the ancient imperial capital of Vietnam, Huế, during the Tet Offensive ( left). was murdered in early April, and Robert Kennedy was killed in June, almost two months to the day after King. Between these came the abdication of Lyndon Johnson and not one but two major assassinations. There was an A-list of nearly monthly events, from the Tet Offensive for January and February to the triumph of Richard Nixon in November’s presidential election. In the United States, the turmoil of ’68 probably compares to 18. Writers have compared it to the most dramatic moments in modern history- 1789, 1848, 1914, 1989. ![]() Given the number of half-century retrospectives I’ve read about it, 1968 was quite a year. Is it Still 1968? Musings on a Frozen History
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