Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee

Anderson defines the 1960s' ``movement'' as a loose, ever-shifting coalition of social activists including civil rights and Vietnam War protesters, feminists, students, ecologists and hippies. In his analysis, the movement was generally leaderless and was not defined by new-left philosophy; rather, its members were motivated by the old-fashioned American pragmatism that drove protesters during other reform eras--the Revolution, Jacksonian democracy, the populist and progressive era and the New Deal. Far from being a failure, as critics contend, the movement, in Anderson's estimate, cracked a rigid Cold War culture, forced campus and educational reform, sped the passage of civil rights legislation, revolutionized the status of women and influenced mainstream politics, which co-opted many of its ideas about citizen and community empowerment. Professor of history at Texas A&M University, Anderson draws heavily on interviews, underground newspapers, leaflets and participants' memoirs to create a vivid newsreel. His sweeping study is a valuable, refreshingly unbiased reassessment of the '60s legacy. (Apr.)