Read both some pages from the book and the article below and after that write a
discussion of only ONE paragraph of ten sentences or more.
1) You must begin with an opinion. For example: Did you like what you read? Why? Did
it disturb you? Why? What do you find most interesting? Why?
2) You must support your opinion by quoting and citing a line or two from the article.
3) You must support your opinion, as well, by providing historical context. You must do
this by quoting and citing the pages I provided.
The discussion should be answering theses questions:
1.
What were some of the students’ principal targets for criticism, and why?
2.
In what ways did the events of 1968 personally transform some of these students?
3.
Some historians argue that the student protests of 1968 made governments less
inviolable and sacred. What evidence can you find here to support this assertion?
PAGES FROM THE BOOK
Printed Page 950
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The protests of the 1960s began in the midst of astonishing technological
advances. These advances steadily boosted prosperity and changed daily life in the
West, where people awoke to instantaneous radio and television news,worked with
computers, and used new forms of contraceptives to control reproduction. Satellites
orbiting the earth relayed telephone signals and collected military intel ligence, while
around the world nuclear energy powered economies. Smaller gadgets—electric
popcorn poppers, portable radios and tape players, automatic garage door openers —
made life more pleasant. The increased use of machines led one philosopher to insist
that people were no longer self -sufficient individuals, but rather cyborgs—that
is, humans who needed machines to sustain ordinary life processes.
Printed Page 950
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Information technology powered change in the postindustrial period that began in the
1960s, just as innovations in textile making and the spread of railroads had in the
nineteenth century. This technology’s ability to transmit knowledge,culture, and
political information globally made it even more revolutionary. In the first half of the
twentieth century, mass journalism, film, and radio had begun to forge a more uniform
society based on shared information and images.In the last third of the
century, television, computers, and telecommunications made information even more
accessible and, some critics said, made culture more standardized. Once-remote
villages were linked to urban capitals on the other side of the world thanks to
videocassettes, satellite television, and telecommunications. Because of
technology, protests became media events worldwide.
Printed Page 950
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Americans embraced television in the 1950s; following the postwar recovery, it was
Europe’s turn. Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, Europeans rapidly adopted
television as a major entertainment and communications medium. In 1954, just 1
percent of French households had television; by 1974,almost 80 percent did. With the
average viewer tuning in about four and a half hours a day, the audience for
newspapers and theater declined. “We devote more…hours per year to television than
[to] any other single artifact,” one soci ologist commented in 1969. As with
radio, European governments funded television broadcasting with tax dollars and
controlled TV programming to avoid what they perceived as the substandard fare
offered by American commercial TV; instead they featured
drama, ballet, concerts, variety shows, and news. The welfare state, in Europe at
least, thereby gained more power to shape daily life.
The emergence of communications satellites and video recorders in the 1960s
brought competition to state -sponsored television. Worldwide audiences enjoyed
broadcasts from throughout the West as satellite technology allowed for the global
transmission of sports broadcasts and other programming. What statesmen and
intellectuals considered the junk programming of the Unit ed States—soap operas, game
shows, sitcoms—arrived dubbed in the native language. Feature films on videotape
became readily available to television stations (although not yet to individuals) and
competed with made-for-television movies and other programs. The competition
increased in 1969 when the Sony Corporation introduced the first affordable color
videocassette recorder to the consumer market. Critics complained that, although TV
provided more information than had ever been available before, the resulting shared
culture represented the lowest common denominator.
East and west, television exercised a powerful political and cultural
influence. Even in a rural area of the Soviet Union, more than 70 percent of the
inhabitants watched television regularly in the late 1970s. Educational programming
united the far-flung population of the USSR by broadcasting shows designed to
advance Soviet culture. At the same time, with travel impossible or forbidden to
many, shows about foreign lands were among the most popul ar—as were postcards
from these lands, which became household decorations. Heads of state could usually
bump regular programming. In the 1960s, French president Charles de Gaulle appeared
frequently on television, using the grandiose gestures of an imperia l ruler to stir
patriotism. As electoral success in western Europe increasingly depended on
cultivating a successful media image, political staffs needed media experts as much as
they did policy experts.
Printed Page 951
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Just as revolutionary as television, the computer reshaped work in science,defense, and
ultimately industry. Computers had evolved dramatically since the first electronic
ones, like the Colossus used by the British in 1943 to decode Nazi military and
diplomatic messages. Several countries had devised these machines, all of them
primitive by later standards in being gigantic, slow, noisy,and able only to
decode. From the 1940s to the 1980s, computing machines shrank from the size of a
gymnasium to that of an attaché case. They also became both far less expensive and
fantastically more powerful, thanks to the development of increasingly sophisticated
digital electronic circuitry implanted on tiny silicon chips, which replaced clumsy
radio tubes. Within a few decades,the computer could perform hundreds of millions of
operations per second and the price of the integrated circuit at the hear t of computer
technology would fall to less than a dollar.
Computers changed the pace and patterns of work not only by speeding up tasks
but also by performing many operations that workers had once done themselves. In
garment making, for example, experienced workers no longer painstakingly figured out
how to arrange patterns on cloth for maximum economy. Instead, a computer specified
instructions for the best positioning of pattern pieces, and trained workers, usually
women, followed the machine’s direction s. Soon, like outworkers of the eighteenth
century, people could work for large industries at home, connected to a central
mainframe. In 1981, the French phone company launched a public Internet server, the
Minitel—a forerunner of the World Wide Web —through which individuals could make
reservations, perform stock transactions, and obtain information.
1957
Soviet Union launches the first artificial satellite, Sputnik
1961
Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbits the earth; capsule carrying
Alan Shepard Jr. makes first U.S. suborbital flight
1965
United States launches first commercial communications
satellite,Intelsat I
1969
U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Ed win “Buzz” Aldrin walk on
moon’s surface
1970s–
present
Soviet Union and United States individually and in collaboration
with various countries perform space station maneuvers, lunar
probes, and other scientific experiments
1971
Soviet Union attempts unsuccessfully to put the space station Salyut
1 into orbit
1973
United States puts the experimental space station Skylab into orbit
1976
Viking spacecraft explores Mars
1979–
1986
Spacecraft Voyager makes successful flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and
Uranus
Whereas during the Industrial Revolution mechanical power replaced humans’
physical energy, the computer technology of the information revolution added to
brainpower and thus advanced the postindustrial age. Many observers believed that
computers would profoundly expand mental capacity, providing, in the words of one
scientist, “boundless opportunities…to resolve the puzzles of cosmology, of life, and
of the society of man.” Others countered that computers programmed people, reducing
human initiative and the ability to solve problems.The information revolution was
under way.
Printed Page 952
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The “space race” between the United States and the Soviet Union, also made possible
by computers, began when the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957. The
competition led to increasingly complex space flights that tested humans’ ability to
survive the process of space exploration, including weightlessness. Astronauts walked
in space, endured weeks (and later months) in orbit, docked with other craft, fixed
satellites, and carried out experiments for the military and private industry. In
addition, a series of unmanned rockets launche d weather,television, intelligence, and
other communications satellites into orbit around the earth. In July 1969, a worldwide
television audience watched as U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz”
Aldrin walked on the moon’s surface —the climactic moment in the space race.
The space race also influenced Western culture.Astronauts and cosmonauts were
perhaps the era’s most admired heroes: Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn, and Valentina
Tereshkova—the first woman in space—topped the list. A whole new fantasy world
developed. Children’s toys and games revolved increasingly around space. Films such
as2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) portrayed space explorers answering questions about
life that were formerly the domain of church leaders. Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s
popular novel Solaris (1961), later made into a film,described space -age individuals
engaged in personal quests and drew readers and ultimately viewers into a futuristic
fantasy.
The space age grew out of cold war concerns, and advances in rocket technology
not only launched vehicles into space but also powered destructive missiles. At the
same time, the space age promoted and even depended on global cooperation. From the
1960s on, U.S. spaceflights often involved the participation of other countri es. In
1965,an international consortium headed by the United States launched the first
commercial communications satellite, Intelsat I—a feat envisioned since early in the
postwar period. By the 1970s, some 150 countries were working together at more than
four hundred stations worldwide to maintain global satellite communications. Although
some 50 percent of satellites were for spying purposes, the rest made international
communication and the global transmission of data possible. Transnational
collaboration was more than ever a necessity.
Pure science flourished amid the space race. Astronomers used mineral samples
from the moon to calculate the age of the solar system with unprecedented
precision. Unmanned spacecraft provided data on cosmic radiation, magnetic
fields, and infrared sources. Although the media depicted the space age as one of
warrior astronauts conquering space, breakthroughs depended on the products of
technology, including the radio telescope, which depicted space by
receiving, measuring, and calculating nonvisible rays. These findings reinforced the
so-called big bang theory of the origin of the universe,first outlined in the 1930s by
American astronomer Edwin Hubble and given crucial support in the 1950s by the
discovery of low-level radiation permeating the universe in all directions. The big
bang theory proposes that the universe originated from the explosion of
superdense, superhot matter some ten to twenty billion years ago.
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Scientists, government officials, and engineers put the force of the atom to economic
use, especially in the form of nuclear power, and the dramatic boost in available
energy helped continue postwar economic expansion into the 1960s and beyond. The
USSR built the first nuclear plant to produce electricity in Obinsk in 1954, followed by
Britain and the United States. During the 1960s and 1970s, nuclear power for
industrial and household use multiplied a hundredfold —a growth that did not include
the nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, which also multiplied in this
period.
Because of the vast costs and complex procedures involved in
building,supplying, running, and safeguarding nuclear reactors, governments provided
substantial aid and even financed nuclear power plants almost entirely. “A state does
not count,” announced French president Charles de Gaulle, “if it does not…contribute
to the technological progress of the world.” The watchword for all governments
building nuclear reactors was technological development —a new function for the
modern state. The USSR sponsored plan ts throughout the Soviet bloc as part of the
drive to modernize, but it was not alone—Western nations,too, continued to rely on
nuclear power. In 2006, France produced some 80 percent of its energy, and the United
States 20 percent, via nuclear power plants.More than thirty countries had substantial
nuclear installations in the twenty-first century, with new ones under construction.
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A revolution in the life sciences brought about dramatic health benefits and ultimately
changed reproduction itself. In 1952, scientists Francis Crick, an Englishman, and
James Watson, an American, discovered the structure of deoxyribonucleic
acid (DNA) the material in a cell’s chromosomes that carries hereditary
information. Simultaneously, other scientists were working on “the pill” —an oral
contraceptive for women that capped more than a century of scientific work in the
field of birth control. Still other breakthroughs in biology lay ahead, including ones
that revolutionized conception and made possible the scientific duplication of
species (cloning).
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Crick and Watson solved the mystery of biological inheritance when they demonstrated
the structure of DNA. They showed how the double helix of the DNA molecule splits
in cellular reproduction to form the basis of each new cell.This genetic
material, biologists concluded, provides a chemical pattern for an individual
organism’s life. Beginning in the 1960s, genetics and the new field of molecular
biology progressed rapidly. Growing understanding of nucleic acids and proteins not
only led to increased knowledge about viruses and bacteria but also effectively ended
in the West such diseases as polio, mumps, measles,tetanus, and syphilis through the
development of new vaccines.
Scientists used their understanding of DNA to alter the makeup of plants and to
bypass natural animal reproduction in a process called cloning —obtaining the cells of
an organism and dividing or reproducing them in an exact copy in a laboratory. In
1997, the process had so evolved that one group of British researchers produced a
cloned sheep named Dolly, though she suffered an array of disabilities and died six
years later. Cloning raised questions about whether scientists should interfere with so
basic and essential a process as reproduction. Similarly, the possibility of genetically
altering plant and animal species and even creating new ones (for instance, to control
agricultural pests) led to concern about how such actions would affect the balance of
nature.
In 1967, Dr. Christiaan Barnard of South Africa performed the first successful
heart transplant. Other researchers later developed both immuno -suppressants(to
prevent rejection of the transplant) and an artificial heart. As major advances like
these occurred,commentators began to ask whether the enormous cost of new medical
technology to save a few people would be better spent on helping the many who lacked
even basic medical care.
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Technology also influenced the most intimate areas of human relations —sexuality and
procreation. Matching family size to agricultural productivity no longer shaped sexual
behavior in the industrialized and urbanized West. With reliable birth-control devices
more readily available, young people began sexual relations earlier, with less risk of
pregnancy. These trends accelerated in the 19 60s when the birth-control pill, the result
of research around the world, was first marketed in the United States. The pill was
initially tested on American medical students in Puerto Rico and then on a larger scale
among Puerto Rican nurses,many of whom w ere eager for reliable contraception.By
1970, the pill’s use was spreading around the world.Millions also sought out voluntary
surgical sterilization through tubal ligations and vasectomies. New techniques brought
abortion, traditionally performed by amate urs, into the hands of medical
professionals,making it a safe procedure for the first time.
Childbirth and conception were similarly transformed. Whereas only a small
minority of Western births took place in hospitals in 1920, more than 90 percent did by
1970. Obstetricians now performed much of the work midwives had once done. As
pregnancy and birth became a medical process, new procedures and equipment made it
possible to monitor women and fetuses throughout pregnancy, labor, and delivery. The
number of medical interventions such as cesarean births rose.
In 1978, the first “test-tube baby,” Louise Brown, was born to an English
couple. She had been conceived when her mother’s eggs were fertilized with her
father’s sperm in a laboratory dish and then implant ed in her mother’s uterus—a
complex process called in vitro fertilization If a woman could not carry a child to
term, the laboratory-fertilized embryo could be implanted in the uterus of a
surrogate, or substitute, mother. Researchers even began working on an artificial womb
to allow for reproduction entirely outside the body —from storage bank to artificial
embryonic environment. In reproductive technology, as in other areas, the revolution
in biology was dramatically changing human life,improving health, and even making
new life possible.
ARTICLE
2. A REVOLUTIONARY TIME
Student Voices of Protest (1968)
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College campuses were hotbeds of social activism during the 1960s, and they exploded into action
with unprecedented force in the spring of 1968. The year was beset with tragedies, from the mounting
number of casualties in the Vietnam War to the assassination of American civil rights leader Martin
Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Students from New York to Paris to
Berlin rose up in protest, particularly over racial and antiwar issues. They demonstrated, occupied
buildings, shut down classes, and went on strike. The following excerpts bring these students to life in
their own words, which convey not only frustration and despair but also a desire to bring about
lasting change.
Source: From Ronald Fraser et al., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon Books,1988), 9–
12.
My most vivid memory of May ’68? The new-found ability for everyone to speak—to speak of
anything with anyone. In that month of talking during May you learnt more than in the whole of your
five years of studying. It was really another world—a dream world perhaps—but that’s what I’ll
always remember: the need and the right for everyone to speak.—René Bourrigaud,student at the
École Supérieure d’Agriculture, Angers, France
People were learning through doing things themselves, learning self-confidence. It was magic,there
were all these kids from nice middle-class homes who’d never done or said anything and were now
suddenly speaking. It was democracy of the public space in the market place, a discourse where
nobody was privileged. If anything encapsulated what we were trying to do and why, it was that. . .
. —Pete Latarche, leader of the university occupation at Hull, England,1968
It’s a moment I shall never forget. Suddenly, spontaneously, barricades were being thrown up in the
streets. People were building up the cobblestones because they wanted—many of them for the first
time—to throw themselves into a collective, spontaneous activity. People were releasing all their
repressed feelings, expressing them in a festive spirit. Thousands felt the need to communicate with
each other, to love one another. That night has forever made me optimistic about history. Having lived
through it, I can’t ever say, “It will never happen.”. . . —Dany Cohn-Bendit, student leader at Nanterre
University, on the night of the Paris barricades, 10–11 May 1968
The unthinkable happened! Everything I had ever dreamt of since childhood, knowing that it would
never happen, now began to become real. People were saying, fuck hierarchy, authority,this society
with its cold rational elitist logic! Fuck all the petty bosses and the mandarins at the top! Fuck this
immutable society that refuses to consider the misery, poverty, inequality and injustice it creates, that
divides people according to their origins and skills! Suddenly, the French were showing they
understood that they had to refuse the state’s authority because it was malevolent, evil, just as I’d
always thought as a child. Suddenly they realized that they had to find a new sort of solidarity. And it
was happening in front of my eyes. That was what May ’68 meant to me! . . . —Nelly
Finkielsztejn, student at Nanterre University, Paris
My world had been very staid, very traditional, very frightened, very middle-class and
respectable. And here I was doing these things that six months before I would have thought were just
horrible. But I was in the midst of an enormous tide of people. There was so much constant collective
reaffirmation of it. The ecstasy was stepping out of time, out of traditional personal time. The usual
rules of the game in capitalist society had been set aside. It was phenomenally liberating. . . . At the
same time it was a political struggle. It wasn’t just Columbia. There was a fucking war on in
Vietnam, and the civil rights movement. These were profound forces that transcend that
moment. 1968 just cracked the universe open for me. And the fact of getting involved meant that
never again was I going to look at something outside with the kind of reflex condemnation or
fear. Yes, it was the making of me—or the unmaking.—Mike Wallace, occupation of Columbia
University, New York, April 1968
We’d been brought up to believe in our hearts that America fought on the side of justice. The Second
World War was very much ingrained in us, my father had volunteered. So, along with the absolute
horror of the war in Vietnam, there was also a feeling of personal betrayal. I remember crying by
myself late at night in my room listening to the reports of the war, the first reports of the
bombing. Vietnam was the catalyst. . . . —John Levin, student leader at San Francisco State College
I was outraged, what shocked me most was that a highly developed country, the super-modern
American army, should fall on these Vietnamese peasants—fall on them like the conquistadores on
South America, or the white settlers on the North American Indians. In my mind’s eye, I always saw
those bull-necked fat pigs—like in Georg Grosz’s pictures—attacking the small, child-like
Vietnamese.—Michael von Engelhardt, German student
The resistance of the Vietnamese people showed that it could be done—a fight back was possible. If
poor peasants could do it well why not people in Western Europe? That was the importance of
Vietnam, it destroyed the myth that we just had to hold on to what we had because the whole world
could be blown up if the Americans were “provoked.” The Vietnamese showed that if you were
attacked you fought back, and then it depended on the internal balance of power whether you won or
not. . . . —Tariq Ali, a British Vietnam Solidarity Campaign leader So we started to be political in a
totally new way, making the connection between our student condition and the larger international
issues. A low mark in mathematics could become the focal point of an occupation by students who
linked the professor’s arbitrary and authoritarian behavior to the wider issues, like Vietnam. Acting on
your immediate problems made you understand better the bigger issues. If it hadn’t been for
that, perhaps the latter would have remained alien, you’d have said “OK, but what can Ido?”—Agnese
Gatti, student at Trento Institute of Social Sciences, Italy
Creating a confrontation with the university administration you could significantly expose the
interlocking network of imperialism as it was played out on the campuses. You could prove that they
were working hand-in-hand with the military and the CIA, and that ultimately, when you pushed
them, they would call upon all the oppressive apparatus to defend their position from their own
students. . . . —Jeff Jones, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), New York regional organizer
Everybody was terribly young and didn’t know what was going on. One had a sort of megalomaniac
attitude that by sheer protest and revolt things would be changed. It was true of the music, of the
hallucinogenics, of politics, it was true across the board—people threw themselves into activity
without experience. The desire to do something became tremendously intense and the capacity to do it
diminished by the very way one was rejecting the procedures by which things could be done. It led to
all sorts of crazy ideas.—Anthony Barnett, sociology student, Leicester University, England