The Practice College Paper                                    Topic: Coming to terms with the 1960s

* Easiest option: Choose one or two of the chapter topics from Unger, the times were a changin’, and make these sources the basic material for your Practice College Paper.

Work with the sources in the book as you make your own point about the topic. You will probably need to look up some materials, but not many, beyond the Unger book.

* The Cavallo book, Problems in Making Sense of the Sixties, shows both the weaknesses of sixties youth movements AND their idealism. Where do you stand on the question of "whether the 1960s made US culture take wrong turns"? Are you FOR or AGAINST those affluent youth movements?

* Arts and activism in the 60s – choose examples of any art form or performing artist(s) from the period (dance, song/poetry, records and cover graphics, a movie, Hair, posters, etc etc) and develop a question about them. Did the arts have any effect on history? Did they achieve the effects they set out to achieve?

Do you think music and the arts today still has the power shown in the arts of the 60s?

* Fashion and style: What statements do clothes make? Compare clothing in the present to styles from the 60s and 70s. Is clothing/hair as furious an issue now as then?

* The ‘sixties is a period said to reflect a sudden expansion of the sense of the self—its possibilities, its importance. What makes a self? What problems or opportunities go along with the types of self invented during the later 20th century? How does a young person take on an identity? Why can that be such a problem?

* Peace Corps (founded 1960 by JFK) – Did it do good back then? Is it still relevant now?

* Write a great academic essay criticizing some aspect of the academy–schools, university, classwork--and referring to ideas from the 1960s along the way.  Have universities/schools reformed in the ways ‘60s writers called for?

* Does each of us have a VOICE? Do our voices matter in society, influence government, connect with others? What prevents someone from having a voice?
Are we alienated from one another? From our ability to control our own lives? From ourselves?

* The present generation appears very worried about “security”. Evaluate the ‘60s values of freedom, rights, and social transformation from an early 21st century point of view. Are our American values in danger, or not?

* Socialism or capitalism? Or both? What position do you take on the basic differences between these ways of organizing society? How balance the value of a social safety net with the value of free enterprise, for example?

* Which media were current during the 1960s, and how did that make social relationships and the Public operate differently than at present?

* Compare claims of social “alienation” in the present with the early movement charging our culture with alienation during the 1960s. What conclusions do you come to? Are young people more or less alienated than back then? Is it possible to know? Are the causes of alienation the same or different? 

* Ethics in athletics during the 1960s. Are our sports really more corrupt now?

* What was going on with the environmental movement in the 1960s? What did people think of the natural world?

- Science or computers in the 1960s. 

- Terrorism in the 60s—what was going on?

– the six day war (Palestine)

– Bay of Pigs

– Winter Soldier film (Vietnam)

– the Cold War – nukes

– national debt –

* Start by listing your own worries or hopes/aims right now.  Write a paper in which you assert some goal of your own about living in our society today. Quote and reflect on—agreeing and disagreeing with--some of the statements from 1960s writers to help you make your own case. What do you want changed, and why?

* Evaluate the Port Huron Statement by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and do some research on the status of its issues in the present. If some kind of student statement were written NOW, what would it say? What would be its call to action? The Congressional Budget Office webpage can provide some data.

* Come up with your own more interesting topic relating to the 1960s. For example, choose your own hobby or cause and find out how developments in the 1960s may have been connected to it.