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This chapter looks at the relationship between shamanism and psychedelic culture, focusing on the experience of investment banker R. Gordon Wasson and his Russian-born wife, Valentina, with mushrooms. Valentina and Gordon eventually embarked on their lifelong quest to explore the role of mushrooms in the histories and folklore of different cultures. When Valentina died of cancer in 1958, Gordon continued this quest alone. Eventually, his explorations evolved into research on possible links between hallucinogenic mushrooms and early religion. What came out of this research was a small community of scholarship that brought together people who believed that plant hallucinogens gave rise to human spirituality in archaic times; essentially, Wasson and his colleagues added a new hallucinogenic dimension to shamanism studies. That “psychedelic scholarship,” which was closely linked to the counterculture of the 1960s, not only informed the debates about shamanism among academics but also aroused and fed public interest in shamanism.

The creation of the federal Head Start program in 1965 put the needs of young children from poor families on the national agenda. Head Start was inspired both by research suggesting the promise of early intervention and by the politics of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, which required that it be launched quickly and on a large scale, and that it bypass the structures of local government. Local programs varied widely in how they prioritized Head Start's different goals, making it difficult to assess the program's success. By drawing national attention to the promise of preschool for the poor, Head Start also spurred interest in preschool for other children, leading to the expansion of public kindergartens, private nursery schools, and the television show Sesame Street.

This chapter begins by considering Vice President Dan Quayle's 1992 “Murphy Brown” speech, and goes on to explore the rise and rhetoric of the Christian Right, which mobilized American evangelicals and fundamentalists to re-enter the political process during the 1970s and 1980s. After a brief recapitulation of the historical background of evangelical and fundamentalist involvement in 20th‐century American politics, the chapter looks at the Christian Right jeremiad, which emphasizes the 1960s as the time period when a godly nation strayed from its moral and spiritual roots and embraced an ideology of secularism. The Christian Right nests this tale of American decline within a story of American chosenness, especially in the fight against communism. The Christian Right jeremiad propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency and continues to play an important role in Republican Party politics.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the changes that occurred in the religions history of the Western world during the ‘long 1960s’, a period which lasted from 1958 to 1974. Four major themes are highlighted. First, from the 1950s to the 1970s there was an enormous increase in the range of beliefs and world-views accessible to the majority of the population. Second, there was a change in the way that people in most Western countries understood the religious identity of their own society. Third, there was a serious weakening of the process by which the great majority of children were socialized into membership of a Christian society and in particular were given a confessional identity and a basic knowledge of Christian beliefs and practices. Fourth, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Catholics and Protestants moved closer together. But as the divisions between the Christian churches were narrowing, the divisions within each of the churches were deepening. The main objectives of the books are then described.

This chapter begins by discussing some of the main theories advanced by historians and sociologists to explain the religious crisis of the 1960s. It then suggests a historical framework within which the dramatic developments in that decade can be understood. It argues that to understand the unique atmosphere of the 1960s one also has to take account of specific events and movements. In particular, three stand out as being of pivotal significance in the political and religious radicalization and polarization during that decade, namely the US Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the Second Vatican Council.

This chapter shows that during the 1960s there was an increasing affinity between the notion that de‐institutionalized religion is something good and the intellectual and social sensibilities of the period. Two views on secularization and de‐institutionalization of religion, those of Christian theologian Harvey Cox and sociologist Peter L. Berger, mirrored the intellectual and social climate of the time and were broadly discussed and debated. In this chapter Slavica Jakelić argues that Berger and Cox's claims about the inevitable link between deinstitutionalization of religions and modernity were persuasive because they happened in a context in which “religionless religion” was increasingly becoming the ideal of religious life. Berger and Cox talked of the de‐institutionalization of religion as progress that brought about freedom for individuals to choose. Their prophecies of godlessness were the prophecies of freedom.

This concluding chapter presents a summary of discussions in the preceding chapters, discussing the similarities and differences between these explanations and those offered by other writers. It contends that explanations for religious change in the 1960s must operate at three levels: the long-term preconditions, the effects of more immediate social changes, and the impact of specific events, movements, and personalities. In this respect, the methodology used in this study is closest to that of Alan Gilbert who, in The Making of Post-Christian Britain integrates a range of factors, some very long-term and others much more recent.

The many voices in Philosophical Investigations should not be read as one correct voice and various voices of metaphysical nonsense. Instead, Cavell insists, the voices are all Wittgenstein's. That is part of what it means to say that Wittgenstein's work belongs to the genre of confession. So does Cavell's. This chapter turns to Cavell's writings on tragedy, Vietnam, and the student protests of the '60s in order to illuminate such confession. Although Cavell might have developed a more robust politics by attending to the work of someone like Marx or Foucault, his insistence on confession, the repentant acknowledgment of complicity with injustice, is an indispensable part of theology, philosophy, and political protest.

This chapter explores how the two youth cultures under discussion — the motor-bike boys, sometimes known as ‘rockers’, and the hippies, sometimes known as ‘heads’ or ‘freaks’ — form a ‘dialectic relationship’ with cultural life. It argues that it is only in the factories, on the streets, in the bars, in the dance halls, in the tower flats, in the two-up-and-two-downs that contradictions and problems are lived through to particular outcomes. Furthermore, it is in these places where direct experience, ways of living, creative acts and penetrations — cultures — redefine problems, break the stasis of meaning, and reset the possibilities somewhat for all of us. And this material experience is embedded in the real engagement of experience with the world: in the dialectic of cultural life.

This chapter analyses the resurgence of the jazz avant‐garde in New York in the mid‐1960s, focusing in particular upon musicians' negotiation of competing aesthetic, social, and economic imperatives. Through a detailed investigation of shifting patterns of reception in the jazz press, attention is drawn to a complex of factors that lifted the jazz avant‐garde from near obscurity in the early years of the decade, to a canonised status by 1965. Prominent amongst these factors was the politically radical discourse promoted by figures associated with the Black Arts Movement such as Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, which conceived black avant‐garde musicians as shaping the spiritual foundation for revolutionary change. The articulation of a radical social purpose thus assisted the process of canonisation, although this canonisation brought no parallel economic success.

Avant‐garde music played a small but important role in American cultural diplomacy during the cold war. In Western Europe, it was meant to demonstrate the United States' cultural sophistication; in Eastern Europe, to present a provocative alternative to socialist realism. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the music both engaged elite listeners and elicited feelings of respectful indebtedness from broader audiences. The latter relationship can be described as an unusual form of “gift economy” in which questions of prestige and value were negotiated through the medium of a musical performance with its accompanying publicity. While during the 1960s avant‐garde jazz and art music were treated alike in some respects, American officials were more likely to alter jazz programs, reflecting ambivalent expectations about their global audiences and about jazz as high art.

The first Soviet synthesizer was developed in the late 1950s by a military engineer named Yevgeniy Murzin. Named after Murzin's hero Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, the ANS synthesiser was soon toured overseas as a symbol of the Soviet Union's technological prowess. However, by the mid 1960s official interest had waned and both the synthesizer and its studio, although continuing to be supported by official subsidies, fell into the hands of the musical“underground”. The studio thereby became a centre for“unofficial” concerts which undercut the dominant Soviet Realist aesthetic codes. It also witnessed a generational shift within the underground, from the older“academic” avant‐gardists to a younger generation fascinated by progressive rock. The multimedia“happenings” staged at the studio in the early seventies finally precipitated the studio's closure, although it was the synthesizer's brief association with avant‐garde composers such as Schnittke, Denisov and Gubaidulina that figured most prominently in the official justification.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. Over the four decades since Kennedy's violent death in Dealey Plaza, the event has been interpreted and represented in ever-widening contexts, but several themes have become constant. The iconic phrases and images that sum up the event — the grassy knoll, the sniper's lair, the magic bullet, the head-snap, Jackie scrambling over the back of the limousine — have become a kind of verbal and visual shorthand for a loss of faith in the authorities and the official version of events, and a more general sense of nostalgic grief for the demise of the promise of youth and idealism supposedly embodied by Kennedy. In short, the flashbulb memories of the assassination provide an instant iconography of the 1960s in general and the loss of an exceptionalist sense of American national destiny in particular. With the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the meaning of the Kennedy assassination has shifted once again. No longer is the death of JFK the most significant traumatic event for living Americans. If the news networks learned on the job during the Kennedy assassination how to cover a breaking story of major importance, then they had perfected the art by the time of the terrorist attacks.

The artistic avant‐garde, many of its theorists seem to agree, is a culture of subversion. Yet recent Anglo‐American musicology has tended to emphasise avant‐garde music's disavowal of issues of social and political concern. This volume assesses the intense engagement of many avant‐garde musicians in the tumultuous cultural and political developments of the 1960s, and the complex and often ambivalent status of their efforts when viewed in the wider social context. These musicians' conviction that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows inevitably threw up some sharp dilemmas. Each chapter is briefly summarized.