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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.

This chapter gives an overview of the history of the term ‘avant‐garde’ as it has been used in the historiography of art. The point of departure is the lack of agreement as to the term's meaning. Noting the almost complete absence of the term in the statements of the early 20th‐century artists more recently viewed as representing the avant‐garde's apogee, the chapter emphasises instead the role of the 1960s avant‐garde in retrospectively constructing an ‘historical avant‐garde’ to serve as their legitimating forebear. The 19th‐century association of the term with the service of political ideology was essential to its appeal in the 1960s, but this putative radicalism was muddied by the later, early 20th‐century understanding that progressive artists should lead, not serve. The chapter also notes how the association of artistic avant‐gardes with radical political movements undoubtedly contributed to the avant‐garde's alleged demise in the 1980s and 1990s.

This chapter examines student unrest and government response in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. It explores the impact of this defining event on the leftist student political landscape at UNAM as evident in at least four significant ways: the radicalization of students throughout the 1960s in response to the proliferation of charrismo estudiantil; the revaluation of the importance of ideology; the creation of innovative spaces of contestation; and the rise of reactionary politics and political violence. The chapter argues that the internationalist spirit of the 1960s gave rise to a new culture of protest inside UNAM. It illustrates the characteristics of Mexico's “New Left” by focusing on the following individuals: the political cartoonist Rius; the participants of the university cine-clubs; the collaborators of Radio Universidad; and the writers of el espectador, Revista de la Universidad, and El Corno Emplumado.

This chapter covers the tumultuous 1960s at UNC and beyond, and at the Daily Tar Heel. The 1960 Dixie Classic, UNC’s most infamous sports scandal, is discussed, as is a 1961 speech on campus by President John F. Kennedy. The Civil Rights Movement is covered in detail, as Chapel Hill was a center for protest; the student newspaper took on a new activist role during this time, sending reporters across the South to report on Civil Rights events. The infamous Speaker Ban Law is examined in detail, 1963-1968. In 1963 UNC became completely co-educational, and the changes on campus and the issues facing women students is explored, including the role of the sexual revolution, access to birth control, and the fight over legalizing abortion. The major shift in state politics, away from one-party Democratic rule is discussed, and the rise of conservative politician Jesse Helms, who used UNC and the Daily Tar Heel as examples of extreme liberalism and permissiveness to help build his political base. The Vietnam War, the 1969 UNC Foodworker’s Strike, gay rights, and contributions of later renowned cartoonist Jeff MacNelly on the newspaper are other topics in this chapter

Steve Reich’s Four Organs (1970) is a watershed work in the history of musical minimalism, famously causing an uproar at Carnegie Hall on January 18, 1973. Scholars have typically discussed the work’s technical details and have avoided drawing a wider intertextual circle around it to encompass contemporaneous auditory cultures and contexts. Filling this lacuna, this chapter offers a historically plausible reading of the piece, in part by identifying linkages to 1960s US/UK pop/rock and soundtracks for film and television and by attending to the composition’s peculiar instrumentation, its rhythmic-metrical patterns, and its narrative trajectory. What emerges is a fresh interpretation of Four Organs: the work narrates a form of subjective sublimation charged with psychedelic sound imagery, effecting that sublimation through a semblance of bodily and planetary departure—and, as such, suggests racial-political resonances with the US space program during the Cold War, including the previous year’s Apollo lunar landing in 1969.

The analysis conducted in this chapter of the religious changes undergone by the Federal Republic since its founding considers the religious losses as well as the sometimes astonishing resistance of religious and church entities, but also the observable small religious increases. It addresses the following questions among others: Is it really the case that there has occurred a break in tradition in terms of people’s ties to the church? In which periods was religious change particularly dynamic, and in which periods was it less so? Did this change occur in the Catholic and Protestant churches in parallel? Are there counter-movements when it comes to free churches and small religious communities such as the charismatic churches? How have individualized forms of religiosity developed, especially those of non-church religiosity? The chapter not only describes religious changes in West Germany, but by referring to contextual conditions also explains the main tendencies observable there.

Abstract: The chapter considers nonvoting after World War II, a unique electoral period in American history with the lowest nonvoting rates of any period from 1920–2012. The post-war period also boasts the highest economic growth rate of any of the four periods, coupled with the early days of television which transformed politics in the 1950s. In general, economic growth and the introduction of television move nonvoting rates downward. The chapter also considers in detail the struggles leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the law’s impact on nonvoting rates among African Americans. It also uncovers that in the 1960s the Vietnam War increased nonvoting. The chapter begins an analysis of nonvoting at the individual level. The less individuals know about the campaign context and the less they form comparisons between the candidates, the more likely they will say home on Election Day.

It was especially in radical reformist, to a lesser extent in modernist, and only occasionally in conservative religious circles, that near-death experiences were held to harbor significant religious meaning. This chapter identifies some major trends of the “religious crisis” (McLeod) of the 1960s, such as the deinstitutionalization of church religiosity, the rise of alternative spiritualities, and the imperative of resorting to the privileged, first-person experience, that contributed to the growing importance of near-death experiences.

Chapter 5 chronicles my doctoral program at MIT, where I’m a token woman and an “honorary man” starved for female companionship. I discuss several of my professors: Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Evsey Domar. I review my decision to conceal my pregnancy when I go on the job market and its ultimate revelation several months later. I contrast my career and marriage to Alice’s (she also has a Ph.D. in economics), and try to understand why I never ask Sam to do any housework. I discuss my difficult experience giving birth at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and my subsequent post-partum depression, which lifts instantly when I find a caretaker for my very young son (by far the scariest thing I have ever done) and begin teaching at the University of Maryland. I describe my elation at completing my doctoral thesis and becoming an assistant professor at Maryland, and compare my ability to speak out and improve the situation during my second birth to my sense of powerlessness during my first. I discuss the mentorship provided to me by Barbara Bergmann.The chapter ends with moving to California and finding a job as a lecturer at Berkeley.

The introduction begins with the author’s reflections on musicals as a young boy in the 1960s and as a performer in the 1970s. It then moves to a brief history and description of the roadshow as a long-standing motion picture marketing and distribution format. The roadshow thrived in the 1950s with epic-scale filmmaking, then combined with the musical film with spectacular success with My Fair Lady in 1964 and The Sound of Music in 1965. The introduction then establishes the central theme, theses, and topics for the book, i.e., the quick devolution of the large-scale film musical from its zenith in the mid-1960s to its demise in the early 1970s. Several factors are mentioned: lack of creativity, miscasting, conglomerate takeover of film studios, aging out-of-touch executives, and, perhaps most powerfully, a society undergoing rapid change. The introduction concludes with author reflections on the research and writing of Roadshow!

This chapter reconstructs Indira Gandhi’s role conception by analysing the Prime Minister and her core advisors’ public and private communication record. Indira Gandhi’s regional role conception of India as a security seeker, it is contended, was shaped by three core inter-related beliefs: a definition of India’s interests in more narrow terms compared to Nehru’s beliefs, and, a regional image centred on the subcontinent rather than on an extended Asian space that lay at the heart of Nehru’s image; a divisible conception of security rather than an indivisible one, and an inclination to leverage the balance of power for geopolitical advantage rather than to reform Asia’s interaction culture as per Nehru’s role conception; and, an inclination to employ coercive means to solve disputes or to pursue geopolitical ends in South Asia rather than a preference for ethical statecraft and strategic restraint embodied in Nehru’s worldview.

When she learned that an item called “Suitcase of Love and Shame” was available on Ebay, Jane Gillooly jumped at the chance to see what might be in that suitcase. The audio tapes she discovered there chronicled the secret love affair of a married man and his lover during the early 1960s. In Gillooly’s film these tapes become a secret window into a particular era and its ways of thinking, talking, loving, and documenting itself. Much has been made of the camera’s ability to create a voyeuristic viewer; Suitcase transforms the audience into “audioistic” voyeurs. Gillooly’s reworking of the tapes is accompanied by evocative imagery, often filmed in the locations described on the tapes.