[ News
| Homes
| Life
| Entertainment
| History
| Science
| Community
| Shop ]
| Sport
| Culture
| Cars
| Money
| Broadband
| Learning
| Health
| Dating
| Games ]
[ Text Only: Homepage ]
[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]
Home | What is Hello Culture? | The grid | The interviews | Find out more | Credits
Hippies
Also known as 'flower power', the hippie movement was closely associated with the use of hallucinatory drugs, but it was also about personal freedom and release from the strictures of 'straight' society. Hippies believed that people should be free to look the way they want to (hence the long hair) and live the way they want to: free love was 'in', the work ethic and material possessions were 'out'.
Although the hippie movement was international, it was strongest in the United States, particularly in California. The height of hippiedom was the Summer of Love of 1967, but the movement could not survive economic recession and faded in the 1970s.
The movement was not overtly political: its message was peace and love. However, its proponents were certainly on the left of the political spectrum, and it did, to a limited extent, overlap with the civil rights and anti-war movements. But hippies were primarily interested in the sex, the drugs and the music — festivals and acid culture were as important to them as anything else.
Find out more …
The Old Hippies Groovy Site
http://members.aye.net/~hippie/real.htm
All you need to get back into the1960s — the Grateful Dead, Diggers, Haight Ashbury, poetry and more — in this hippy webring.
The Wild Bohemian Homepage
www.halcyon.com/colinp/bohemian
More hippy and Beat generation links.
The Last of the Hippies by C J Stone (Faber, 1999) £9.99.
The personalities and events of the hippy movement; their influence, philosophy, fashion and activism.
Yippies
Yippies were members of the Youth International Party, the brainchild of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, two young American political activists. Yippies were a reaction to the political apathy of the hippie movement from which they emerged. The party's flag was black (for anarchy) with a red star (for socialism) and a marijuana leaf.
The main focus of the Yippies' rage and ridicule was the Vietnam war, although they criticised the entire economic and political system of the US. The Yippies' moment of truth came at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Hoffman nominated a pig called Pegasus to run as the Yippie candidate against Richard Nixon (on the grounds that at least theirs was a candidate you could eat). Events turned violent, and both Hoffman and Rubin, along with six other Yippies, were charged with conspiracy to riot. The 'Chicago 7' trial that followed was a circus, the defendants frequently taunting and ranting against the court. Together, they were cited for contempt more than 200 times. They were found guilty, but the judgement was overturned in 1972.
Ultimately, the movement failed to mobilise the hippie generation, although the party still exists in some form as Yippie2K. Hoffman — on the run from the FBI for drug offences — continued to campaign for political change, turning his focus to environmental activism, until his suicide in 1989. Jerry Rubin became a successful business executive before his death (hit by a vehicle while jaywalking) in 1994.
Find out more …
Yippie!
http://free.freespeech.org/yippie/
In the spirit of the yippies, links and history about the Chicago Trial, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and all.
The Sixties Papers, edited by Judith C Albert and Stewart E Albert (Praeger Publishing, 1984) £23.50.
Documents of the period by Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, H Rap Brown, Abbie Hoffman and Robin Morgan.
New Age travellers
Combining the freedom ethic of the hippies with the wanderlust of the 'road' generation, New Age travellers reject the urban life in favour of a peripatetic existence. Originally a Californian phenomenon, travellers became an essential part of British counterculture in the 1980s, when thousands of people escaped, in caravans and lorries, from the homelessness and unemployment of Thatcher's inner cities.
Often professing beliefs in Buddhism and mysticism, travellers were very much part of the 1980s' festival culture, taking their caravans to 'tribal gatherings' at sites of Druidic importance, such as Stonehenge. But their rejection of 1980s' urban consumerism was met with force. In 1985, a gathering for the summer solstice was met with a massive police convoy who refused to allow the travellers access to Stonehenge. Violence followed and the episode — known as the 'Battle of Beanfield' — led to the 1986 Public Order Act, which cracked down on travellers' lifestyles. Government antipathy to travellers led to the development of links between them and ravers who, equally disliked by the authorities, were also looking for outdoor venues to party.
Find out more …
My Diary
www.gn.apc.org/tash/diary.htm
One traveller’s diary, with photos of festivals, convoys and nomads.
Moving Targets: Britain’s 'New Age' travellers by Colin Clark and Angus Murdoch (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000) £14.99.
How travellers see themselves and relate to others, plus questions about their future.