First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The sixth edition of The Sixties is a provocative account of a transformative era in American history, exploring the significant political, social, and cultural changes that many citizens found to be not only necessary, but mandatory. The book explores the 1960s both chronologically and thematically, from the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins and presidential election to the early 1970s and the fight for women’s liberation and withdrawal from Vietnam. It examines the unique social movements that merged during and after 1968 to form a “sixties culture” that advocated for empowerment and liberation. The final chapter on legacies and the section of additional reading have been revised and updated for the sixth edition, now including more recent material to reinforce the book’s themes and explore the impacts of the sixties that are still felt today. Additional coverage of women and the LGBTQ and Latino/a communities paints a richer portrait of the decade of tumult and change. Lucid and engaging, The Sixties is a stimulating text ideal for students and general readers interested in one of the most significant eras in American history—the 1960s.

The Sixties is a stimulating account of a turbulent age in America. Terry Anderson examines why the nation experienced a full decade of tumult and change, and he explores why most Americans felt social, political and cultural changes were not only necessary but mandatory in the 1960s. The book examines the dramatic era chronologically and thematically and demonstrates that what made the era so unique were the various social "movements" that eventually merged with the counterculture to form a "sixties culture," the legacies of which are still felt today. The new edition has added more material on women and the GLBTQ community, as well as on Hispanic or Latino/a community, the fastest-growing minority in the United States.

This second volume of Christopher Isherwood's remarkable diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution. Isherwood takes the reader from the bohemian sunshine of Southern California to a London finally swinging free of post-war gloom, to the racy cosmopolitanism of New York, and the raw Australian outback. He charts his ongoing quest for spiritual certainty under the guidance of his Hindu guru, and reveals in reckless detail the emotional drama of his love for the American painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior and struggling to establish his own artistic identity. The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the time - Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, Leslie Caron, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, Hope Lange, W. Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Vanessa Redgrave, Tony Richardson, David O. Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, and many others. They are most revealing about Isherwood himself - his fiction (including A Single Man and Down There on a Visit), his film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. He moves easily from Beckett to Brando, from arthritis to aggression, from Tennessee Williams to foot powder, from the opening of Cabaret on Broadway (which he skipped) to a close analysis of Gide. In the background run references to the political and historical events of the period: the anxieties of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarin's space flight, De Gaulle and Algeria, the eruption of violence in America's inner cities, the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the moon landing, and the raising and lowering of hemlines. Isherwood is well known for his prophetic portraits of a morally bankrupt Europe on the eve of World War II; in this unparalleled chronicle, The Sixties, he turns his fearless eye on the decade which more than any other has shaped the way we live now.

British Fictions of the Sixties focuses on the major socio-political changes that marked the sixties in relationship to the development of literature over the decade. This book is the first critical study to acknowledge that the 1960s can only be understood if, next to its contemporary socio-political history, its fictions and mythologies are acknowledged as a vital constituent in the understanding of the decade. Groes uncovers a major epistemological shift, and presents a powerful meta-narrative about post-war literature in the UK, and beyond. British Fictions of the Sixties offers a re-examination of canonical writers such as Iris Murdoch, Angela Carter, Muriel Spark and John Fowles. It also pays critical attention to avant-garde writers including Ann Quinn, Bridget Brophy, Eva Figes, Christine Brooke-Rose, and J. G. Ballard, presenting a comprehensive insight into the continuing power the decade exerts on the contemporary imagination.

In 1957, there were over a thousand men in prison for 'homosexual offences'. A little over half a century later, homosexuality is an active part of the mainstream. Homosexuality has a public profile - on TV, in film and in literature and popular culture. When did today's fairly open discourse on homosexuality begin? Sebastian Buckle argues that homosexuality as a public identity began after the Second World War, on the release of the Wolfenden Report which recommended gay sex be decriminalised, and tells the story of homosexuality in the public eye. Buckle takes us through early images of homosexuality in the 1950s, the founding of the Gay Liberation Front, Section 28 and community radicalism under Margaret Thatcher's government, the AIDs crisis of the 1980s, the expanding musical and cultural influence of gay subcultures and the resulting partial acceptance into the mainstream of queer identities. The result is a complex and nuanced history of gay movements, society and the media, and a fresh look at how the struggle for acceptance and equality has been fought.

From Muddy Waters to Mick Jagger, Elvis to Freddie Mercury, Jeff Buckley to Justin Timberlake, masculinity in popular music has been an issue explored by performers, critics, and audiences. From the dominance of the blues singer over his "woman" to the sensitive singer/songwriter, popular music artists have adopted various gendered personae in a search for new forms of expression. Sometimes these roles shift as the singer ages, attitudes change, or new challenges on the pop scene arise; other times, the persona hardens into a shell-like mask that the performer struggles to escape. Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music is the first serious study of how forms of masculinity are negotiated, constructed, represented and addressed across a range of popular music texts and practices. Written by a group of internationally recognized popular music scholars—including Sheila Whiteley, Richard Middleton, and Judith Halberstam—these essays study the concept of masculinity in performance and appearance, and how both male and female artists have engaged with notions of masculinity in popular music.

Taking up such issues as mainstreaming, the male gaze, and female masculinity, this book puts forward provocative readings of little explored texts and offers new insights into the contemporary representation of lesbians.

Who are the most significant gay icons and how did they develop? What influence do they have on gay individuals and communities? This book focuses on the superstars, femmes fatales and divas of the gay celebrity pantheon--Mae West, Julie Andrews, Britney Spears, RuPaul, Cher, Divine, Sharon Needles and many others--and their contributions to gay culture and the complications of sexual and gender identity. The author explores their allure along with the mechanisms of iconicity.