Civil rights marches. Black Power. Anti-Vietnam war mobilizations. Campus-based student uprising. Countercultural youth rebellion. Women’s liberation. Revolutionary urban guerrillas.  It all coalesced into the catch-all term “the Movement.” The 1960s in the United States has been defined as an era of protest and turbulent transformation.  The social, cultural, and political waves of that era continue to ripple through the American body politic and its cultural imagination. To paraphrase William Faulkner, the era of the 1960s isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.  In our contemporary moment: Occupy. Black Lives Matter. Antifa. Indivisible. Women’s March. The new catch-all term for this period of renewed protest and activism is “the Resistance.”

This course will explore the protest movements of the 1960s through the lens of media coverage both in the mainstream press of the day – newspapers, general interest newsmagazines, photojournalism, television, popular culture, as well as the Movement’s own burgeoning underground press.  We do so not only to understand an endlessly fascinating and often misunderstood moment in American history but also, crucially, to investigate what that period of protest can tell us about our current moment of protest and activism. Since the Occupy movement against income inequality and, more significantly, the Black Lives Matter movement, and now, most recently, the protests against Trumpism, white supremacy, and the emergence of the so-called “alt-right,” we are in a period of dissent, demonstrations, and mass movement unseen since the 1960s.  Contemporary protest movements, mass mobilizations, and confrontations are garnering media attention similarly unseen since the media pre-occupation with the activism of the 1960s.  Are there useful lessons we can learn? Are there legacies we can trace? Are there ways in which our contemporary moment and its media environment are fundamentally different? To what extent can “making sense of the Sixties” help us make sense of our similarly turbulent moment?

This discussion-heavy course will adopt a bit of a workshop approach. The instructor, an expert on the social movements of the 1960s and the era’s media landscape, will bring that expertise to the classroom. Students will be responsible for bringing research, questions, information, artifacts, and ideas about the contemporary media environment and current protest movements and activism to classroom discussion. This will be an active, two-way, and participatory endeavour.