The Times They Were a-Changin'

The Long 1964 That Redefined America and Drew the Battle Lines of Today

Robert S McElvaine

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2022
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781950994120
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

An award-winning historian onthe transformative year in the sixties that continues to reverberate in our lives and politics—for readers of Heather Cox Richardson. If 1968 marked a turning point in a pivotal decade, 1964—or rather, the long 1964, from JFK's assassination in November 1963 to mid-1965—was the time when the sixties truly arrived. It was then thatthe United States began a radical shift toward a much more inclusive definition of "American, " with a greater degree of equality and a government actively involved in social and economic improvement.It wasa radical shift accompanied by a cultural revolution. The same month Bob Dylan released his iconic ballad "The Times They Are a-Changin', " January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced his War on Poverty. Spurred by the civil rights movement and a generation pushing for change, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Immigration and Nationality Act were passed during this period. Thiswas a time of competing definitions of freedom. Freedom from racism, freedom from poverty. White youth sought freedoms they associated with black culture, captured imperfectly in the phrase "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll." Along with freedom from racist oppression, black Americans sought the opportunities associated with the white middle class: "white freedom." Women challenged rigid gender roles. And in response to these freedoms, the changing mores, and youth culture, the contrary impulse found political expression in such figures as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, proponents of what was presented as freedom from government interference.Meanwhile, a nonevent in the Tonkin Gulf would accelerate the nation's plunge into the Vietnam tragedy.In narrating 1964's moment of reckoning, when American identity began to be reimagined, McElvaine ties those past battles to their legacy today. Throughout, hecaptures the changing consciousness of the period through its vibrant music, film, literature, and personalities.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction 1964 in the Context of the History of “The Land of the Free”
• Chapter 1 “A Change Is Gonna Come”: 1964 and the Battle Lines of Today
• Chapter 2 Death and Rebirth: An Early Start to a Long Year: JFK Departs; the Beatles Arrive
• Chapter 3 The Colossus of the Long 1964: Lyndon Baines Johnson
• Chapter 4 Declaring War on Racism and Poverty: Lyndon Johnson Moves to Spread “White Freedom”
• Chapter 5 The End of the Old Frontier: Dr. Strangelove, or: How We Learned to Start Laughing and Hate the Bomb
• Chapter 6 A Whiter Shade of Pink: The British Invasion, First Wave
• Chapter 7 “You Don’t Own Me”: Asserting Women’s Freedom through Song and Other Means
• Chapter 8 Emancipation Proclamations: Cassius Clay and Malcolm X
• Chapter 9 “This Damned Vietnam Thing”: “We’ve Got to Conduct Ourselves Like Men”
• Chapter 10 Paint It Black with a Union Jack: “Black Freedom” Returns to America: The British Invasion, Second Wave
• Chapter 11 A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare: Three Dead in Mississippi
• Chapter 12 Reenacting Reconstruction(s): The Civil Rights Act and the Great Society
• Chapter 13 The Crossroads of Freedom: The Mississippi Freedom Summer
• Chapter 14 “Extremism in Defense of Liberty”: Goldwater and the Republicans
• Chapter 15 LBJ Proposes to “That Bitch of a War”: The Tonkin Gulf
• Chapter 16 Mrs. Hamer Goes to Atlantic City: The Freedom Party vs. the Anti-Freedom Party
• Chapter 17 Speaking Freely: Berkeley
• Chapter 18 “To Be President of ALL the People”: The 1964 Election
• Chapter 19 “No More a Man’s World Than It Is a White World”: Women and Their Positions
• Chapter 20 Nonviolence and Violence: Year-end in Oslo and Saigon
• Chapter 21 “Unmatched in the History of Freedom”: The Rest of the Long 1964 and the Lasting Impact of the Year
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index