ABSTRACT
I chose the title The Long Sixties to recognize the length of this era over our lives. The term “the long sixties” has floated into academic discourse in the past decade, its origins obscure.6 The concept is useful in two ways. First, it lengthens the period by locating its proximate origins in the civil rights movement and beat generation of the fifties and its ending with America’s defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal that drove President Richard Nixon from office. And second, the concept recognizes that the sixties are with us still, as demonstrated most recently in the personal narratives of the major 2008 presidential candidates. John McCain was a navy pilot who bombed North Vietnam two dozen times before being shot down and imprisoned in Hanoi. Hillary Clinton was an early feminist who shared the values of the 1962 Port Huron Statement (PHS). Barack Obama, born at the time of the 1963 March on Washington, sought validation from a preacher of black liberation theology and was accused during the campaign of “palling” with a former Weathermen founder, William Ayers. As the fiftieth commemoration of everything that occurred in the sixties will be upon us in 2010, it is appropriate that a historic timeline be published as well, for the use of students, historians, and participants in what I call the coming “battle over memory.”
