The 1960s: hip and myth

In one week last summer, television presented us with documentaries marking the quarter-century anniversaries of the moon landing, Chappaquidick, Woodstock and the Manson murders. Each of these events seemed to offer a symbolic conclusion to the story of America in the 1960s, but it was by no means clear - as much to the TV viewers at the time as to today's audience - what all these events amounted to.

The Sixties: From Memory to History contains a variety of narratives by younger American historians about the economic, political, social and cultural changes of the decade (despite the neutrality of the title, the book only addresses the history and memory of Americans).

In his introduction David Farber explains that the book should not be read as a call for another 1960s, but as a cautionary tale about the changing nature of "cultural authority and political legitimacy" in America.

The reader, however, is left unclear as to the moral of that tale. Farber's own contribution, placed at the end of the book, argues with passion and compassion that Nixon succeeded in speaking to the "silent majority" of working-class Americans, for whom the establishment and the countercultural rebels were equally untrustworthy since both dealt in cultural rather than productive capital. Whatever the truth of this claim about middle Americans, the essay does engage in a discussion about the meaning of the 1960s today.

George Lipsitz's chapter on pop music and youth rebellion likewise has an awareness of its participation in a debate which is as much about current cultural authority and political legitimacy, as it is about what "really" happened in the 1960s.

Some of the other contributions seem to fight shy of addressing the memory as well as the history of the decade seeking instead - as the introduction explains -to "paint those times on to the larger canvas of American history". This is in part because many of the essays are chapters taken from books or works-in-progress. Chester J. Pach's survey of the TV coverage of Vietnam, for example, forms part of a larger study of war and television; consequently the emphasis is more on the history of war reporting than it is on the contested history of the 1960s.

But the desire to insert various narratives of race, labour, gender, sexuality and political power into the larger canvas of American history perhaps also operates as an implicit argument against the 1960s being a moment of rupture - either for the worse, or for the better.

In its judicious summing up of the various histories (rather than the memories) of the decade, the collection bears out Lipsitz's claim that "the myth of the 1960s has served as more of an impediment than an aid toward understanding contemporary cultural politics".

This book does form a useful compendium of studies by experts in each field, who provide ample suggestions for further reading in the notes.

Yet, like the long week of anniversaries last summer, the book remains a collection of stories that refuse to add up.

Peter Knight is a graduate student, University of York, working on conspiracy theories in 1960s America.