Hippie+Culture+during+the+Summer+of+Love+and+Woodstock

Claire Pokopac 1* Honors American History

Hippie Culture during the Summer of Love and Woodstock

Hippie Culture began in the 1960s as the Baby Boom Generation was maturing into teens. They felt constricted by their parent's values and opposed what the government was doing in Vietnam. They embraced the sexual revolution and vegetarianism and felt that psychedelic drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms and marijuana could expand your conscious.

Who "the dictionary defines a hippie as anyone who rejects the conventional customs of society" but hippies called themselves "blooming flower children" and they rejected all the traditional values of society. They advocated peace and peacefully protested everything the government did in Vietnam. Hippies respected all animals and many were vegetarian's. They were also a driving force in the sexual revolution with public nudity and free love.

Fashion Hippies felt that jeans were an antifashion statement because they were cheap easy to care for and didn't add to the illusion of class, they wore all of their jeans in their ways embroidered, rolled up or even with rips and patches. They loved Salvation Army stores and after Sergeant Pepper came out army/navy surplus stores.

Music They were heavily influenced by bands like Grateful Dead and Santanna and most especially the beatles album Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. They also advocated amateur singing and music; many had guitars that they would play for anyone who would listen.

Where The biggest hippie festivals were Woodstock in 1969 and the Summer Of Love in 1967

Woodstock 500,000 people attended the "three days of peace and music" five times more than the estimated 100,000. The festival was originally planned to take place in an industrial park but the town said that it would violate town codes, so it was held on Max Yasgers dairy farm. There were food shortages and bad weather and poor sanitation but they still kept the peace. Three people died at the event while three were born.

Summer of Love In the summer of 1967 100,000 hippies came to San Francisco's Haight Ashburry neighborhood for the Summer of Love. Everything as good at first, there was free food, free drugs, free clinics, free housing and free love, but with the rapid influx of people this quickly collapsed. They began to have drug and crime problems and many left come fall to go back to college. The people from the haight staged a funeral for "the death of the hippie" bearing a coffin down the street filled with bells and ribbons and colorful peace signs.

When Hippie culture broke out in the mid-1960s and continues through today.

Why Hippies felt the older dominant culture had come together in a corrupt culture that they called "the establishment" or "the man" or "Big Brother" They wanted to get away and create their own culture.

 Works Cited  “Assimilation of the Counterculture .” //American Decades//. 2001. //Gale U.S. History in Context//. Web. 13 May 2011. .  “Haight-Ashbury .” //St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture//. 2000. //Gale U.S. History in Context//. Web. 16 May 2011. .  “Hippies.” //Bowling, Beatniks, and Bell-Bottoms: Pop Culture of 20th-Century America//. 2002. //Gale U.S. History in Context//. Web. 16 May 2011. .  “Hippies.” //St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture//. 2000. //Gale U.S. History in Context//. Web. 16 May 2011. .  “Hippies and their Music: Woodstock .” //American Decades//. 2001. //Gale U.S. History in Context//. Web. 13 May 2011. .  “Secondhand Clothes and Tie-Dyed Shirts: Antifashion and the Hippie Influence.” //American Decades//. 2001. //Gale U.S. History in Context//. Web. 13 May 2011. .