home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Editor's Note
-
-
- The 1960s was a decade of social and political upheaval. Some
- of this turmoil had positive results: the civil rights
- revolution, John F. Kennedy's bold vision of a New Frontier and
- the breathtaking advances in space helped bring about progress
- and prosperity. Much, however, was negative: student and antiwar
- protest movements, political assassinations and ghetto riots
- roiled the U.S. and resulted in diminished respect for authority
- and the law. The U.S.'s violent spasms were mirrored by leftist
- youth revolt in Europe and Red Guard rampages in China.
-
- The decade began under the shadow of the Cold War, with
- U.S.-Soviet tensions aggravated by the U-2 incident, the Berlin
- wall, the Cuban missile crisis and the space race. It ended
- under the shadow of the Viet Nam War, which deeply divided
- Americans--and their allies--and undermined the country's
- self-confidence and sense of purpose.
-
-
- TIME CAPSULE/THE 60S has been adapted and condensed from the
- contents of TIME, The Weekly Newsmagazine. The words, except
- for connecting passages in brackets [], are those of the
- magazine itself. The date at the beginning of each excerpt is
- the issue date of the magazine.
-
- Everybody remembers the 1960s. Those who lived through the
- decade, even if they were not civil rights marchers in Alabama,
- hippies in Haight-Ashbury or soldiers in Viet Nam, felt the
- impact of the events that shook the nation and the world; people
- remember where they were when John Kennedy was shot and how they
- stopped awestruck to watch on TV as men first walked on the
- moon. And even those who did not live through the events
- themselves, nevertheless know who the Beatles were, and what
- "tune in, turn on, drop out'' meant, and why we celebrate a
- nation holiday on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.
-
- That is why making the selections for this TIME CAPSULE was
- so difficult: everyone remembers the 1960s in his or her own
- way. The reader should remember then that the acts of selecting
- the texts and writing the bridging passages necessarily reflect
- the assumptions and attitudes, conscious or unconscious, of this
- decade and of the capsule's editor.
-
-