History Mysteries: What did you remember about the Hippies in the 60s? How did you view them?

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At first the college student radicalism of the 1960s was separate from the hippie movement but gradually the two phenomena became inter-related. "Hip" was defined to be "in the know" and particularly about the drug underworld.

The appeal of the hippie mystique to young people in the 60s was social protest along with normal feelings of rebellion characteristic of adolescence. They craved for love, joy and self-realization and they believed that their needs could satisfied through drugs. The culture of the hippies involved electronically amplified rock music, psychedelic art and communal type relationships. Arguably, the spread of the Hippie movement was popularized by the drug LSD, a "conscious expanding" medicine.

From the primary sources available to me, the media at the time referred to these people as the "flower children" or the "love generation." The largest colony of Hippies was in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, which was where the Summer of Love was held.

There was a broader appeal to the Hippie movement other than drugs, there was the Vietnam War to consider. A lot of young people believed that their country's participation in the Vietnam War was morally indefensible and their hatred of the war was a major factor in their feelings of alienation from the whole prevailing system of society. For the first time, there was a fierce public debate over a war and this was due to the influx of information that was available. Causalities of the war was shown on the TV screen and people became aware of not only the conditions that the soldiers had to deal with but also the innocent civilians who were dying.