Cast upon the shore: Oral history and new scholarship on the movements of the 1960s

Journal of American History

Volumn 83, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 560-570

  Eynon, Bret ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750229124     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2944948     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. This essay confronts an immediate question: Does "the sixties" mean the period from January 1, 1960, through December 31, 1969, or is it something else? Here I will focus on dissenting social movements including the civil rights, black liberation, student, and antiwar movements, the counterculture, women's liberation, and a broader range of movements that began taking shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some notable works have recently appeared. In addition to the books cited in this essay, see Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana, 1994);
2. articles by emerging scholars in Barbara L. Tischler, ed., Sights on the Sixties (New Brunswick, 1992);
3. and David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill, 1994).
4. On the use of oral testimony, see Ronald J. Grele, Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History (Chicago, 1985);
5. and Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany, 1990).
6. Paul Buhle, ed., History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950-1970 (Philadelphia, 1990).
7. See Jonathan Soffer, "Oral History and the History of American Foreign Relations," Journal of American History, 82 (Sept. 1995), 607-16.
8. The most influential books of these years include Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987);
9. James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York, 1987);
10. Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York, 1988);
11. and Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters; America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York, 1988).
12. Other interesting but less widely recognized studies include Buhle, ed., History and the New Left;
13. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis, 1989);
14. Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks, Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up (Philadelphia, 1989);
15. Ronald Fraser et al., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York, 1988);
16. and George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia, 1988).
17. For historiographic surveys, see Winifred Breines, "Whose New Left?," Journal of American History, 75 (Sept. 1988), 528-45;
18. Bret Eynon, "Look Who's Talking: Oral Memoirs and the History of the 1960s," Oral History Review, 19 (Spring 1991), 99-107;
19. and Maurice Isserman, "The Not-So-Dark and Bloody Ground: New Works on the 1970s," American Historical Review, 94 (Oct. 1989), 990-1010.
20. John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York, 1994);
21. Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 1995);
22. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville, 1995);
23. James R. Ralph Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1993);
24. John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, 1994);
25. Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York, 1993);
26. Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, 1995). Barbara Ransby, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is at work on an oral history-based biography of Ella Baker.
27. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom;
28. Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York, 1977).
29. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, 106, 181-82, 190, 207.
30. Ralph, Northern Protest, 154;
31. Horne, Fire This Time.
32. Beyond the civil rights movement, scholars have only begun using oral testimony for in-depth examinations of local activism. Buhle examines the history faculty and graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, but his work does not attempt a history of 1960s activism in Madison, Wisconsin. See Buhle, ed., History and the New Left.
33. On one of the most colorful communities, see W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York, 1989).
34. On the evolution of student antiwar activism at four campuses that had earlier drawn at best fragmentary attention, see Kenneth Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (New York, 1993). But Heineman's use of oral history is problematic: though he conducted 38 interviews and frequently refers to them, he rarely quotes from the interviews in either the text or the footnotes. Without seeing the testimony, it is difficult to assess whether it supports Heineman's interpretation.
35. Richard R. Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent during the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick, 1996), 158.
36. Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley, 1994), 111.
37. Echols, Daring to Be Bad;
38. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979);
39. Susan Lynn, "Gender and Progressive Politics: A Bridge to the Social Activism of the 1960s," in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1943-1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia, 1994);
40. Dee Garrison, "'Our Skirts Gave Them Courage': The Civil Defense Protest Movement in New York City, 1955-61," " in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1943-1960, ibid.;
41. Margaret Rose, "Gender and Civic Activism in Mexican American Barrios in California: The Community Service Organization, 1947-1962," " in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1943-1960, ibid.;
42. Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago, 1993);
43. Laura Kaplan, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service (New York, 1995).
44. Armando Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas (Austin, 1995);
45. Mario T. Garcia, Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona (Berkeley, 1994).
46. Although William Wei interviewed more than 100 activists, his book makes scant use of oral testimony. See William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia, 1993).
47. For a more detailed and still highly relevant discussion, see Kim Lacy Rogers, "Oral History and the History of the Civil Rights Movement," Journal of American History, 75 (Sept. 1988), 567-76.
48. Michael Ferber and Staughton Lynd, The Resistance (Boston, 1971);
49. Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York, 1995).
50. William H. Chafe, Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (New York, 1993);
51. Fraser et al., 1968. My dissertation presents excerpts from the interviews conducted by the Contemporary History Project: see Bret Eynon, "Democracy, Community, and Personal Politics: The Civil Rights Influence on New Left Political Culture, Ann Arbor, 1958-1966" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1993).
52. Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York, 1987).