More-nuanced historical scholarship on the counterculture really began in earnest only in the 2000s, following Imagine Nation (Routledge, 2002), a collection of essays by historians including Farber and co-edited by Michael William Doyle, an associate professor of history at Ball State University who was a flower child himself. It remains, to date, the only collection on the counterculture by historians. The scholarship was also influenced by Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool (University of Chicago Press, 1997), which attempted to reframe the counterculture as a movement that right from the beginning sat firmly within the value system of consumer capitalism, and Farber’s The Age of Great Dreams (Hill and Wang, 1994), which argued that the importance and complexity of the counterculture had not been recognized.
The paucity of scholarship stands in contrast to the profusion of works on the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, and the Vietnam War, over which herds of historians have pored for decades. “The gap is pretty amazing,” said Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, a historian at St. Mary’s College of California and one of the San Francisco conference’s planners.
One reason for that gap is that the counterculture offers slenderer archival material. As an anti-institutional phenomenon, it never had a defined membership, and many of its products — short-lived underground newspapers, for example — were thrown away. It is also primarily a story about white, middle-class people: It doesn’t really fit in the larger narrative that many American historians have been developing around the making and breaking of equality, said Farber.
Another reason may be that the scholars entering the discipline in the 1970s tended to have backgrounds as activists and focused their scholarship on the political and social movements they had engaged with or admired. A culture of disdain — the New Left had a notoriously antagonistic relationship with the counterculture — then set in. “The idea that the counterculture was fluff, all about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, prevailed until an even younger generation of scholars entered the academy,” said Lemke-Santangelo.
Hippies “seemed (and to many remain) silly and inconsequential,” wrote Alice Echols, a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Southern California, in an email. For a long time, Doyle said in a phone interview, the only people who seemed to accept that the ’60s counterculture had long-lasting, profound effects on American civilization were on the New Right.
Yet what started with a trickle of books in the early 2000s is now a stream. Recent titles include Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture (Chicago, 2016), edited by David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray; Judy Kutulas’s After Aquarius Dawned: How the Revolutions of the Sixties Became the Popular Culture of the Seventies (University of North Carolina Press, 2017); and Joshua Clark Davis’s From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (Columbia University Press) which was published in August. The Sixties, a cross-disciplinary journal rooted in history and started almost a decade ago, offers a home for scholarly papers.