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Media Representations of Everyday Life and of Battles Against the Mainstream, 1962-1965

This page lists online and offline resources related to the media in the early 1960s. A special emphasis is on media representations of everyday life, as well as of the people who battled against mainstream America: youth, racial minorities, women, musicians, the working class, and the counterculture.

The page is part of Retrofuture: Visions of the Future, 1945-1975, which serves a partial bibliography for Waterman, my retrofuture series inspired by the Chesapeake Bay oyster wars, boarding school rivalries in the 1910s, and 1960s visions of things to come. For other bibliographies in this series, please see the main index of the Turn-of-the-Century Toughs Bibliographies.


ALSO AT THIS DOMAIN: New stories | E-books | About the author | Copyright | Contact the author.

Except in the Historical Studies sections, works are listed within each section in chronological order.

Sections below:

Separate page:

General

HISTORICAL STUDIES

Kleinfelder, Rita Lang. When We Were Young: A Baby-Boomer Yearbook. Summarizes the major events of each year, from 1947 to 1975, under the subject headings of news, "beginnings and endings," science and technology, the arts, literature, fashion, popular music movies, television and radio, and sports.

Advertising

TELEVISION: Comedies

Selected episodes from 1964-1965 of Bewitched. The primary male character is an advertiser.

MEMOIRS

Femina, Jerry Dell. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-line Dispatches from the Advertising War (1970). A bitingly humorous account by a copywriter who went on to found his own ad agency.
 

African Americans and Civil Rights

HISTORICAL STUDIES

Phinney, Kevin. Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture (2005).

Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (1998).

Werner, Craig Hansen. A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America (revised edition, 2006).

See also Journalism and the Media.

Chicano and Filipino Farm Workers' Movement

HISTORICAL STUDIES

"Chicano Movement Music," in Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture, edited by Cordelia Candelaria and Peter J. García (2004).

Cultivating Creativity: The Arts and the Farm Workers' Movement During the 1960s and '70s. Includes information on music.

Farmworker Movement Document Project. Text, recordings, and videos. Includes a section with music from the movement.

Counterculture and Youth

BOOKS: Fiction

Walsh, Chad. The Rough Years (1960). Published a year before the film West Side Story, the novel includes depictions of gang warfare from the points of view of the town's teenagers and parents.

Kaufman, Bel. Up the Down Staircase (1964). Written by a teacher, this novel uses memos, letters, classwork, and other documents to portray life for a teacher at a New York City public high school.

Hinton, S. E. The Outsiders (1967). Inspired by real events, this classic young-adult novel tells of working-class teenagers who get caught up in violent rivalry against the rich kids in town. The author, who was middle-class, began writing the novel in 1965, when she was fifteen.

BOOKS: Nonfiction

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Your Teen Years (1964). A pamphlet addressed to teenagers, covering such topics as sports (recommended to girls for its "figure-building values"), careers (recommended to girls because careers help young women to learn skills valuable in "home-making, budget-keeping, and child rearing, as well as . . . the care and feeding of husbands"), and sex ("Today's world has a calmer and more realistic attitude about the subject, and it's possible to get honest answers to most of your questions about sex" . . . but not from this pamphlet, which has nothing more to say on that topic).

HISTORICAL STUDIES

Donalesen, Kenneth L., and Alleeen Pace Nilsen. Literature for Today's Young Adults (1980). Chapter Five discusses books published between 1940 and 1966.

Stern, Jane and Michael. Sixties People (1990). Summarizes the qualities of various "types" in the sixties: perky girls, playboys, young vulgarians ("street-smart teenagers from hardscrabble neighborhoods such as South Philadelphia and the Bronx"), surfers and twisters and party animals, folkniks, "I'm English," hippies, rebels, and "Mr. and Mrs. Average).

See also Greenwich Village and the South Village and Music and Dance.

Daily Life

TELEVISION: Comedies and Dramas

Selected episodes from 1962-1965 of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Gidget, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Get Smart, I Spy, Little Amy, The Lucy Show, andThe Patty Duke Show. Some of these are available in the Moving Images section of the Internet Archive.

Environmental Movement

HISTORICAL STUDIES

Alan Sonfist (Paul Rogers/9W Gallery) and Alan Sonfist (Wikipedia). Descriptions and artwork of an environmental artist who, in 1965, proposed planting forests in fifty locations in Manhattan as an act of art. In 1978, his "Time Landscape" forest was planted in Greenwich Village.

See also Journalism and the Media.

Gay Rights

HISTORICAL STUDIES

Tobin, Kay, and Randy Wicker. The Gay Crusaders (1972). Interviews with gay and lesbian leaders, many of whom were active in the early 1960s.

Greenwich Village and the South Village

BOOKS: Fiction

Neville, Emily. It's Like This, Cat (1963). Set in Gramercy Park, just northeast of Greenwich Village, this young adult novel tells how a fourteen-year-old boy meets a Coney Island girl whose mother is an ex-Parisian beatnik. The book was noted at the time of its publication for its use of slang by the teenage narrator. The author stated in her Newbery Award acceptance speech that she used her children, including her teenage son, as "a kind of perpetual sound track in my ear" when writing the novel.

FILMS: Documentary

Village Sunday (1960). Produced, written, and directed by Stewart Wilensky. A short documentary of Greenwich Village.

MEMOIRS

Rotolo, Suze. A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (2008). The author discusses her upbringing by working-class, Italian-American, Communist parents; the interaction of musicians and artists in Greenwich Village; and her difficulties in establishing an independent identity during the prefeminist era at the same time that she was serving as Bob Dylan's girlfriend.

Van Ronk, Dave, with Elijah Wald. The Mayor of Macdougal Street (2006). A memoir of Greenwich Village, by a folk singer who lived there in the 1950s and 1960s.

Weissman, Dick. Which Side are You On? An Inside Story of the Folk Music Revival in America (2005). Written by a member of the sixties folk group The Journeymen, this book includes a section on the folk revival in Greenwich Village, as eyewitnessed by the author.

See also Music and Dance.

Journalism and the Media

BOOKS: Nonfiction

Ford, James L. C. "Women 'Arrive in Journalism," In  New Survey of Journalism (revised 3rd edition, 1953), edited by George Fox Mott et al.

Mansfield, F[rederick] J[ohn]. Mansfield's Complete Journalist: A Study of the Principles and Practi of Newspaper-making (3rd edition, 1962). Published in England.

Marland, Michael. Follow the News: A Course in the Effective Reading of Newspapers (1967). Published in England.

MEMOIRS

Graham, Katharine. Personal History (1997). Graham describes the legacy of her publishing family: her mother was a pioneer in female journalist, her father and husband were successive publishers of The Washington Post, and Graham herself began doing journalistic work at an early age. In 1963, she became president of the Post.

Terry, Wallace. Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History (2007). Memoirs by black journalists from World War II to the present day.

HISTORICAL STUDIES

Achem, Christine. Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (2004). Argues that black reaction to media representations of African-Americans differed according to various factors such as class. The introduction and first two chapters cover the pre-1966 period.

Cox, Melisma. "The Development of Computer-Assisted Reporting" (2000).

Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture. Includes many references to journalism in 1960s popular culture. For women in journalism, see Sob Sisters: The Image of the Female Journalist in Popular Culture.

Meltzer, Milton,and Bernard Cole, "Martin Schneider," The Eye of Conscience: Photographers of Social Change (1974), 106-122. Describes a photojournalist who began researching air pollution in 1964. His photographs on that topic were eventually published by Life magazine.

Newkirk, Pamela. Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media (2000). In the words of the blurb, the author "charts a series of race-related conflicts at news organizations across the country, illustrating how African American journalists have influenced – and been denied influence to – the content, presentation, and very nature of news." The book covers incidents from the nineteenth century to the present, with most of the book focussed on the post-1970 era.

MUSEUM

Newseum (Washington, D.C.). Devoted to the history of American journalism.

Music and Dance

RECORDINGS

WABC Musicradio 77. The archive of this radio station includes recordings of entire shows in the 1962-1965 period. Copyrighted music is abridged, but there is plenty of advertising and other goodies.

TELEVISION: Music and Dance Shows

Selected episodes/clips from 1962-1965 of American Bandstand (rock), Hollywood á Go Go (rock), Hootenanny (folk), Hullabaloo (rock), the Newport Folk Festival, Rainbow Quest (folk; hosted by Pete Seeger), Ready Steady Go! (rock), Shindig! (rock), Top of the Pops (rock), and Where the Action is! (rock).

See also African-Americans and Civil Rights, Chicano and Filipino Farm Workers' Movement, Greenwich Village and the South Village, and Nuclear Protests.

Northeast Blackout of 1965

HISTORICAL STUDIES (including primary-source books, films, recordings, and photographs)

Blackout History Project. Includes primary source material from the 1965 blackout.

CBC Archives: The "Great Northeastern Blackout" of 1965. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's coverage of the crisis.

WABC Musicradio 77. This radio archive has 1965 recordings and current articles related to the blackout. Do a Web search within the site to locate them all.

Nuclear Protests

HISTORICAL STUDIES

Irwin, Colin. "Power to the People." The Observer (10 August 2008). "Fifty years ago, a generation marched on Aldermaston to ban the bomb, and gave birth to the British protest song."

Women's Rights

See also Journalism and the Media.


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