Books on the topic 'Counterculture of violence'

This book looks at daily life during a pivotal decade in American history: the 1960s. It covers the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement as well as counterculture and protest movements. The 1960s saw the assassination of a popular president; a confusing and unpopular war that claimed the lives of thousands of American combatants; the passage of a national civil rights act that mandated equal rights across all races; countless violent exchanges among Americans with polarized views on the Vietnam War and civil rights; and through it all, the rise of a counterculture movement that challenged long-established American social and cultural traditions. Daily Life in the 1960s Counterculture looks at the 1960s from the perspective of Americans who, despite their best efforts to live normal lives, could not escape the tension, conflict, and controversy that surrounded them. The war and the violence associated with protests of it came at great personal cost to many American families. This book looks those social and cultural changes, examining such topics as the sexual revolution; recreational drug culture; the roles of film, television, and music; and more.

This chapter investigates the circumstances of violence in a way that identifies alternative “domains” in which religious concatenations of violence arise. Despite the fluidity of empirical trajectories and theoretical transitions among analytic types, diverse situations are not so idiosyncratically historicist as to prevent theorization of alternative patterns. Religious communities “contained” by a state may raise countercultural ideologies. The structural circumstances of violence have been modified by apocalyptic war. In social processes, the link of religion to political power differentiates a variety of hegemonic and counterhegemonic conditions in which religion and violence become concatenated. Theorizing relationships between religion and violence should not be an exercise in differentiating “ideal” and “material” causes but rather an effort to understand their complex interplay in social processes.

The authors set out to see if the American school has always been safe. Unfortunately, they found that it has not, that it is confronted in each new generation with a whole new set of threats and dangers. This is a unique book that examines American schools and their safety from the point of view of historical incursions and threats rather than from anecdotal and sometimes questionable information. Through the examination of thousands of documents and incidents, the authors show that the American school has always been subjected to threats from many different sources. Student violence is only a small part of this danger; in fact, the authors show that schools are confronted with many threats besides those presented sporadically by lone violent killers. The authors, at the same time, believe there has been an overreaction to violence that may in itself not be salubrious for the academic programs and moral climates of our schools. After the crisis at Columbine High School, many well-known commentators said that this was the worst crisis ever to take place in an American school. The authors decided to look at the whole topic of school safety in America from the period right after World War II to the present. This unique book is the first to place school safety at the heart of the educational endeavor in America, the first to treat the subject of threats to the school in a broader, historical context, and the first to treat the subject as part of intellectual history. By documenting thousands of instances during the period after World War II through the end of the century, the authors have concluded that the myth of the school as a safe haven has been a comforting, but not always accurate, metaphor. The approach to the subject is from a myriad of perspectives. First, the state of school buildings after the War is discussed. Next, the authors look at juvenile delinquency in the 1950s. Then they put school fires in context, followed by a chapter on school bus accidents and other devastating events from nature. In Civil Rights, Uncivil Schools they discuss the deleterious impact of the century's most important social movement on schools. In the creative chapter, The Demise of Discipline, they demonstrate, through research, ways in which discipline in the schools has been eroded. In A Decadent Counterculture they assess the threats to schools by sex, drugs, and gangs. In Terror Comes to School they show that many violent intrusions began in the 1970s and earlier, well before the 1990s. The concluding chapter, The Paradox of the Clinton Era brings the history to the end of the century. The Postscript discusses new ways of looking at threats to school safety.

This chapter surveys the institutions and movements that brought together the city’s musical life with the aim of merging disparate styles, trends, and personnel. First comes the auto industry, based on archival sources from Ford and General Motors that show how the companies deployed music for worker morale and company promotion. The complementary work of labor follows, through the United Auto Workers’ songs. Next comes the counterculture’s musical moment in the age of the folk revival and the artist collectives of the 1950s–1960s. Motown offers a special case of African American entrepreneurial merging of musical talent and style. The chapter closes with a look at the media—radio and newspapers—with their influential role in bringing audiences together, through music, in a city known for segregation, oppressive policing, and occasional outbursts of violence.

This book provides a fascinating examination of one of the most notorious countercultures in the United States. Skinheads: A Guide to An American Subculture is an insider's look at the history of skinheads in the United States, from their emergence from the U.S. hardcore underground in the 1980s in New York City, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, to the current scene that thrives in many major metropolitan areas today. What makes this revelatory book so compelling is its one-of-a-kind view of skinhead culture from the inside out. Coauthor Perry Hardy is a skinhead, bass player for the band, The Templars, and veteran member of the American skinhead scene since the onset of the movement. Based on his experiences, plus interviews with dozens of skinheads of all kinds, Skinheads draws back the curtain to reveal a world that more often is simply a haven for those disaffected from society, rather than a subculture of hatred or violence.

Concerned with scholarly, popular, and religious backdrops that understand the connection between psychedelics and mystical experiences to be devoid of moral concerns and ethical dimensions—a position supported empirically by the rise of acid fascism and psychedelic cults by the late 1960s—Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America traces the development of sixties psychedelic mysticism from the deconditioned mind and perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley, to the sacramental ethics of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, to the altruistic religiosity practiced by Stephen Gaskin and The Farm. Building directly off the pioneering psychedelic writing of Huxley, these psychedelic mystics understood the height of psychedelic consciousness as an existential awareness of unitive oneness, a position that offered worldly alternatives to the maladies associated with the postwar moment (e.g., vapid consumerism and materialism, lifeless conformity, unremitting racism, heightened militarism). In opening a doorway to a common world, Morgan Shipley locates how psychedelics challenged the coherency of Western modernity by fundamentally reorienting postwar society away from neoliberal ideologies and toward a sacred understanding of reality defined by mutual coexistence and responsible interdependence. In 1960s America, psychedelics catalyzed a religious awakening defined by compassion, expressed through altruism, and actualized in projects that sought to ameliorate the conditions of the least advantaged among us. In the exact moments that historians and cultural critics often locate as signaling the death knell of the counterculture, Gaskin and The Farm emerged, not as a response to the perceived failures of the hippies, nor as an alternative to sixties politicos, but in an effort to fulfill the religious obligation to help teach the world how to live more harmoniously. Today, as we continue to confront issues of socioeconomic inequality, entrenched differences, widespread violence, and the limits of religious pluralism, Psychedelic Mysticism serves as a timely reminder of how religion in America can operate as a tool for destabilization and as a means to actively reimagine the very basis of how people relate—such a legacy can aid in our own efforts to build a more peaceful, sustainable, and compassionate world.

Gnosticism is a countercultural spirituality that forever changed the practice of Christianity. Before it emerged in the second century, passage to the afterlife required obedience to God and king. Gnosticism proposed that human beings were manifestations of the divine, unsettling the hierarchical foundations of the ancient world. Subversive and revolutionary, Gnostics taught that prayer and mediation could bring human beings into an ecstatic spiritual union with a transcendent deity. This mystical strain affected not just Christianity but many other religions, and it characterizes our understanding of the purpose and meaning of religion today. In The Gnostic New Age, April D. DeConick recovers this vibrant underground history to prove that Gnosticism was not suppressed or defeated by the Catholic Church long ago, nor was the movement a fabrication to justify the violent repression of alternative forms of Christianity. Gnosticism alleviated human suffering, soothing feelings of existential brokenness and alienation through the promise of renewal as God. DeConick begins in ancient Egypt and follows with the rise of Gnosticism in the Middle Ages, the advent of theosophy and other occult movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contemporary New Age spiritual philosophies. As these theories find expression in science-fiction and fantasy films, DeConick sees evidence of Gnosticism’s next incarnation. Her work emphasizes the universal, countercultural appeal of a movement that embodies much more than a simple challenge to religious authority.