title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The breakdown of enforcement of the US Hays Code concerning censorship in motion picture production, the use of new forms of artistic expression in European and Asian cinema, and the advent of modern production values heralded a new era of art-house, pornographic, and mainstream film production, distribution, and exhibition. The end of censorship resulted in a complete reformation of the western film industry. With new-found artistic freedom, a generation of exceptionally talented New Wave film makers working across all genres brought realistic depictions of previously prohibited subject matter to neighborhood theater screens for the first time, even as Hollywood film studios were still considered a part of the establishment by some elements of the counterculture. Successful 1960s new films of the New Hollywood were "Bonnie and Clyde", "The Graduate", "The Wild Bunch", and Peter Fonda's "Easy Rider".


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: By the later 1960s, previously under-regarded FM radio replaced AM radio as the focal point for the ongoing explosion of rock and roll music, and became the nexus of youth-oriented news and advertising for the counterculture generation.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Communes, collectives, and intentional communities regained popularity during this era. Early communities such as the Hog Farm, Quarry Hill, and Drop City in the US were established as straightforward agrarian attempts to return to the land and live free of interference from outside influences. As the era progressed, many people established and populated new communities in response to not only disillusionment with standard community forms, but also dissatisfaction with certain elements of the counterculture itself. Some of these self-sustaining communities have been credited with the birth and propagation of the international Green Movement.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The emergence of an interest in expanded spiritual consciousness, yoga, occult practices and increased human potential helped to shift views on organized religion during the era. In 1957, 69% of US residents polled by Gallup said religion was increasing in influence. By the late 1960s, polls indicated less than 20% still held that belief.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The "Generation Gap", or the inevitable perceived divide in worldview between the old and young, was perhaps never greater than during the counterculture era. A large measure of the generational chasm of the 1960s and early 1970s was born of rapidly evolving fashion and hairstyle trends that were readily adopted by the young, but often misunderstood and ridiculed by the old. These included the wearing of very long hair by men, the wearing of natural or "Afro" hairstyles by Black people, the donning of revealing clothing by women in public, and the mainstreaming of the psychedelic clothing and regalia of the short-lived hippie culture. Ultimately, practical and comfortable casual apparel, namely updated forms of T-shirts (often tie-dyed, or emblazoned with political or advertising statements), and Levi Strauss-branded blue denim jeans became the enduring uniform of the generation, as daily wearing of suits along with traditional Western dress codes declined in use. The fashion dominance of the counterculture effectively ended with the rise of the Disco and Punk Rock eras in the later 1970s, even as the global popularity of T-shirts, denim jeans, and casual clothing in general have continued to grow.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In the western world, the ongoing criminal legal status of the recreational drug industry was instrumental in the formation of an anti-establishment social dynamic by some of those coming of age during the counterculture era. The explosion of marijuana use during the era, in large part by students on fast-expanding college campuses, created an attendant need for increasing numbers of people to conduct their personal affairs in secret in the procurement and use of banned substances. The classification of marijuana as a narcotic, and the attachment of severe criminal penalties for its use, drove the act of smoking marijuana, and experimentation with substances in general, deep underground. Many began to live largely clandestine lives because of their choice to use such drugs and substances, fearing retribution from their governments.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The confrontations between college students (and other activists) and law enforcement officials became one of the hallmarks of the era. Many younger people began to show deep distrust of police, and terms such as "fuzz" and "pig" as derogatory epithets for police reappeared, and became key words within the counterculture lexicon. The distrust of police was based not only on fear of police brutality during political protests, but also on generalized police corruption—especially police manufacture of false evidence, and outright entrapment, in drug cases. In the US, the social tension between elements of the counterculture and law enforcement reached the breaking point in many notable cases, including: the Columbia University protests of 1968 in New York City, the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, the arrest and imprisonment of John Sinclair in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Kent State shootings at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, where National Guardsman acted as surrogates for police. Police malfeasance was also an ongoing issue in the UK during the era.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The Vietnam War, and the protracted national divide between supporters and opponents of the war, were arguably the most important factors contributing to the rise of the larger counterculture movement.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The widely accepted assertion that anti-war opinion was held only among the young is a myth, but enormous war protests consisting of thousands of mostly younger people in every major US city, and elsewhere across the Western world, effectively united millions against the war, and against the war policy that prevailed under five US congresses and during two presidential administrations.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The counterculture movement took hold in Western Europe, with London, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome and Milan, Copenhagen and West Berlin rivaling San Francisco and New York as counterculture centers.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The UK Underground was a movement linked to the growing subculture in the US and associated with the hippie phenomenon, generating its own magazines and newspapers, fashion, music groups, and clubs. Underground figure Barry Miles said, "The underground was a catch-all sobriquet for a community of like-minded anti-establishment, anti-war, pro-rock'n'roll individuals, most of whom had a common interest in recreational drugs. They saw peace, exploring a widened area of consciousness, love and sexual experimentation as more worthy of their attention than entering the rat race. The straight, consumerist lifestyle was not to their liking, but they did not object to others living it. But at that time the middle classes still felt they had the right to impose their values on everyone else, which resulted in conflict."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In the Netherlands, Provo was a counterculture movement that focused on "provocative direct action ('pranks' and 'happenings') to arouse society from political and social indifference".


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In France, the General Strike centered in Paris in May 1968 united French students, and nearly toppled the government.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Kommune 1 or K1 was a commune in West Berlin known for its bizarre staged events that fluctuated between satire and provocation. These events served as inspiration for the "Sponti" movement and other leftist groups. In the late summer of 1968, the commune moved into a deserted factory on Stephanstraße in order to reorient. This second phase of Kommune 1 was characterized by sex, music and drugs. Soon, the commune was receiving visitors from all over the world, including Jimi Hendrix.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: "Mánička" is a Czech term used for young people with long hair, usually males, in Czechoslovakia through the 1960s and 1970s. Long hair for males during this time was considered an expression of political and social attitudes in communist Czechoslovakia. From the mid-1960s, the long-haired and "untidy" persons (so called "máničky" or "vlasatci" (in English: Mops) were banned from entering pubs, cinema halls, theatres and using public transportation in several Czech cities and towns. In 1964, the public transportation regulations in Most and Litvínov excluded long-haired "máničky" as displeasure-evoking persons. Two years later, the municipal council in Poděbrady banned "máničky" from entering cultural institutions in the town. In August 1966, "Rudé právo" informed that "máničky" in Prague were banned from visiting restaurants of the I. and II. price category.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In 1966, during a big campaign coordinated by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, around 4,000 young males were forced to cut their hair, often in the cells with the assistance of the state police. On August 19, 1966, during a "safety intervention" organized by the state police, 140 long-haired people were arrested. As a response, the "community of long-haired" organized a protest in Prague. More than 100 people cheered slogans such as "Give us back our hair!" or "Away with hairdressers!". The state police arrested the organizers and several participants of the meeting. Some of them were given prison sentences. According to the newspaper "Mladá fronta Dnes", the Czechoslovak Ministry of Interior in 1966 even compiled a detailed map of the frequency of occurrence of long-haired males in Czechoslovakia. In August 1969, during the first anniversary of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, the long-haired youth were one of the most active voices in the state protesting against the occupation. Youth protesters have been labeled as "vagabonds" and "slackers" by the official normalized press.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: "Oz" magazine was first published as a satirical humour magazine between 1963 and 1969 in Sydney, Australia, and, in its second and better known incarnation, became a "psychedelic hippy" magazine from 1967 to 1973 in London. Strongly identified as part of the underground press, it was the subject of two celebrated obscenity trials, one in Australia in 1964 and the other in the United Kingdom in 1971.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: "The Digger" was published monthly between 1972 and 1975 and served as a national outlet for many movements within Australia's counterculture with notable contributors—including second-wave feminists Anne Summers and Helen Garner; Californian cartoonist Ron Cobb's observations during a year-long stay in the country; Aboriginal activist Cheryl Buchanan (who was active in the 1972 setup of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy; and later partner of poet and activist Lionel Fogarty) and radical scientist Alan Roberts (1925-2017) on global warming—and ongoing coverage of cultural trailblazers such as the Australian Performing Group (aka Pram Factory), and emerging Australian filmmakers. "The Digger" was produced by an evolving collective, many of whom had previously produced counterculture newspapers "Revolution" and "High Times", and all three of these magazines were co-founded by publisher/editor Phillip Frazer, who launched Australia's legendary pop music paper "Go-Set" in 1966, when he was himself a teenager.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In Mexico, rock music was tied into the youth revolt of the 1960s. Mexico City, as well as northern cities such as Monterrey, Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juárez, and Tijuana, were exposed to US music. Many Mexican rock stars became involved in the counterculture. The three-day Festival Rock y Ruedas de Avándaro, held in 1971, was organized in the valley of Avándaro near the city of Toluca, a town neighboring Mexico City, and became known as "The Mexican Woodstock". Nudity, drug use, and the presence of the US flag scandalized conservative Mexican society to such an extent that the government clamped down on rock and roll performances for the rest of the decade. The festival, marketed as proof of Mexico's modernization, was never expected to attract the masses it did, and the government had to evacuate stranded attendees en masse at the end. This occurred during the era of President Luis Echeverría, an extremely repressive era in Mexican history. Anything that could be connected to the counterculture or student protests was prohibited from being broadcast on public airwaves, with the government fearing a repeat of the student protests of 1968. Few bands survived the prohibition, though the ones that did, like Three Souls in My Mind (now El Tri), remained popular due in part to their adoption of Spanish for their lyrics, but mostly as a result of a dedicated underground following. While Mexican rock groups were eventually able to perform publicly by the mid-1980s, the ban prohibiting tours of Mexico by foreign acts lasted until 1989.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The Cordobazo was a civil uprising in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, in the end of May 1969, during the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, which occurred a few days after the "Rosariazo", and a year after the French May '68. Contrary to previous protests, the Cordobazo did not correspond to previous struggles, headed by Marxist workers' leaders, but associated students and workers in the same struggle against the military government.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The Civil Rights Movement, a key element of the larger counterculture movement, involved the use of applied nonviolence to assure that equal rights guaranteed under the US Constitution would apply to all citizens. Many states illegally denied many of these rights to African-Americans, and this was partially successfully addressed in the early and mid-1960s in several major nonviolent movements.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The Chicano Movement of the 1960s, also called the Chicano civil rights movement, was a civil rights movement extending the Mexican-American civil rights movement of the 1960s with the stated goal of achieving Mexican American empowerment.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The American Indian Movement (or AIM) is a Native American grassroots movement that was founded in July 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A.I.M. was initially formed in urban areas to address systemic issues of poverty and police brutality against Native Americans. A.I.M. soon widened its focus from urban issues to include many Indigenous Tribal issues that Native American groups have faced due to settler colonialism of the Americas, such as treaty rights, high rates of unemployment, education, cultural continuity, and preservation of Indigenous cultures.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The Asian American movement was a sociopolitical movement in which the widespread grassroots effort of Asian Americans affected racial, social and political change in the US, reaching its peak in the late 1960s to mid-1970s. During this period Asian Americans promoted antiwar and anti-imperialist activism, directly opposing what was viewed as an unjust Vietnam war.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The American Asian Movement differs from previous Asian-American activism due to its emphasis on Pan-Asianism and its solidarity with US and international Third World movements.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: "Its founding principle of coalition politics emphasizes solidarity among Asians of all ethnicities, multiracial solidarity among Asian Americans as well as with African, Latino, and Native Americans in the United States, and transnational solidarity with peoples around the globe impacted by U.S. militarism."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: and intellectual movement involving poets, writers, musicians and artists who are Puerto Rican or of Puerto-Rican descent, who live in or near New York City, and either call themselves or are known as Nuyoricans. It originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in neighborhoods such as Loisaida, East Harlem, Williamsburg, and the South Bronx as a means to validate Puerto Rican experience in the United States, particularly for poor and working-class people who suffered from marginalization, ostracism, and discrimination.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Young Cuban exiles in the United States would develop interests in Cuban identity, and politics. This younger generation had experienced the United States during the rising anti-war movement, civil rights movement, and feminist movement of the 1960s, causing them to be influenced by radicals that encouraged political introspection, and social justice. Figures like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were also heavily praised among American student radicals at the time. These factors helped push some young Cubans into advocating for different degrees of rapprochement with Cuba. Those most likely to become more radical were Cubans who were more culturally isolated from being outside the Cuban enclave of Miami.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Much of the 1960s counterculture originated on college campuses. The 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, which had its roots in the Civil Rights Movement of the southern United States, was one early example. At Berkeley a group of students began to identify themselves as having interests as a class that were at odds with the interests and practices of the University and its corporate sponsors. Other rebellious young people, who were not students, also contributed to the Free Speech Movement.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The "New Left" is a term used in different countries to describe left-wing movements that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world. They differed from earlier leftist movements that had been more oriented towards labour activism, and instead adopted social activism. The American "New Left" is associated with college campus mass protests and radical leftist movements. The British "New Left" was an intellectually driven movement that attempted to correct the perceived errors of "Old Left" parties in the post–World War II period. The movements began to wind down in the 1970s, when activists either committed themselves to party projects, developed social justice organizations, moved into identity politics or alternative lifestyles, or became politically inactive.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The emergence of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s led to a revival of interest in libertarian socialism. The New Left's critique of the Old Left's authoritarianism was associated with a strong interest in personal liberty, autonomy (see the thinking of Cornelius Castoriadis) and led to a rediscovery of older socialist traditions, such as left communism, council communism, and the Industrial Workers of the World. The New Left also led to a revival of anarchism. Journals like "Radical America" and "Black Mask" in America, "Solidarity", "Big Flame" and "Democracy & Nature", succeeded by "The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy", in the UK, introduced a range of left libertarian ideas to a new generation. Social ecology, autonomism and, more recently, participatory economics (parecon), and Inclusive Democracy emerged from this.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: A surge of popular interest in anarchism occurred in western nations during the 1960s and 1970s. Anarchism was influential in the counterculture of the 1960s and anarchists actively participated in the late 1960s students and workers revolts. During the IX Congress of the Italian Anarchist Federation in Carrara in 1965, a group decided to split off from this organization and created the "Gruppi di Iniziativa Anarchica". In the 1970s, it was mostly composed of "veteran individualist anarchists with a pacifism orientation, naturism, etc, ...". In 1968, in Carrara, Italy the International of Anarchist Federations was founded during an international anarchist conference held there in 1968 by the three existing European federations of France, the Italian and the Iberian Anarchist Federation as well as the Bulgarian federation in French exile. During the events of May 68 the anarchist groups active in France were Fédération anarchiste, Mouvement communiste libertaire, Union fédérale des anarchistes, Alliance ouvrière anarchiste, Union des groupes anarchistes communistes, Noir et Rouge, Confédération nationale du travail, Union anarcho-syndicaliste, Organisation révolutionnaire anarchiste, "Cahiers socialistes libertaires", "À contre-courant", "La Révolution prolétarienne", and the publications close to Émile Armand.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The New Left in the United States also included anarchist, countercultural and hippie-related radical groups such as the Yippies who were led by Abbie Hoffman, The Diggers and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. By late 1966, the Diggers opened free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of political art. The Diggers took their name from the original English Diggers led by Gerrard Winstanley and sought to create a mini-society free of money and capitalism. On the other hand, the Yippies employed theatrical gestures, such as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for President in 1968, to mock the social status quo. They have been described as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic politics". Since they were well known for street theater and politically themed pranks, many of the "old school" political left either ignored or denounced them. According to ABC News, "The group was known for street theater pranks and was once referred to as the 'Groucho Marxists'."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In Trafalgar Square, London in 1958, in an act of civil disobedience, 60,000–100,000 protesters made up of students and pacifists converged in what was to become the "ban the Bomb" demonstrations.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Opposition to the Vietnam War began in 1964 on United States college campuses. Student activism became a dominant theme among the baby boomers, growing to include many other demographic groups. Exemptions and deferments for the middle and upper classes resulted in the induction of a disproportionate number of poor, working-class, and minority registrants. Countercultural books such as MacBird by Barbara Garson and much of the counterculture music encouraged a spirit of non-conformism and anti-establishmentarianism. By 1968, the year after a large march to the United Nations in New York City and a large protest at the Pentagon were undertaken, a majority of people in the country opposed the war.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The application of nuclear technology, both as a source of energy and as an instrument of war, has been controversial.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Scientists and diplomats have debated the nuclear weapons policy since before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. The public became concerned about nuclear weapons testing from about 1954, following extensive nuclear testing in the Pacific. In 1961 and 1962, at the height of the Cold War, about 50,000 women brought together by Women Strike for Peace marched in 60 cities in the United States to demonstrate against nuclear weapons. In 1963, many countries ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty which prohibited atmospheric nuclear testing.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Some local opposition to nuclear power emerged in the early 1960s, and in the late 1960s some members of the scientific community began to express their concerns. In the early 1970s, there were large protests about a proposed nuclear power plant in Wyhl, Germany. The project was cancelled in 1975 and anti-nuclear success at Wyhl inspired opposition to nuclear power in other parts of Europe and North America. Nuclear power became an issue of major public protest in the 1970s.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The role of women as full-time homemakers in industrial society was challenged in 1963, when US feminist Betty Friedan published "The Feminine Mystique", giving momentum to the women's movement and influencing what many called Second-wave feminism. Other activists, such as Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, either organized, influenced, or educated many of a younger generation of women to endorse and expand feminist thought. Feminism gained further currency within the protest movements of the late 1960s, as women in movements such as Students for a Democratic Society rebelled against the "support" role they believed they had been consigned to within the male-dominated New Left, as well as against perceived manifestations and statements of sexism within some radical groups. The 1970 pamphlet "Women and Their Bodies", soon expanded into the 1971 book "Our Bodies, Ourselves", was particularly influential in bringing about the new feminist consciousness.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The 1960s counterculture embraced a back-to-the-land ethic, and communes of the era often relocated to the country from cities. Influential books of the 1960s included Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb". Counterculture environmentalists were quick to grasp the implications of Ehrlich's writings on overpopulation, the Hubbert "peak oil" prediction, and more general concerns over pollution, litter, the environmental effects of the Vietnam War, automobile-dependent lifestyles, and nuclear energy. More broadly they saw that the dilemmas of energy and resource allocation would have implications for geo-politics, lifestyle, environment, and other dimensions of modern life. The "back to nature" theme was already prevalent in the counterculture by the time of the 1969 Woodstock festival, while the first Earth Day in 1970 was significant in bringing environmental concerns to the forefront of youth culture. At the start of the 1970s, counterculture-oriented publications like the "Whole Earth Catalog" and "The Mother Earth News" were popular, out of which emerged a back to the land movement. The 1960s and early 1970s counterculture were early adopters of practices such as recycling and organic farming long before they became mainstream. The counterculture interest in ecology progressed well into the 1970s: particularly influential were New Left eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin, Jerry Mander's criticism of the effects of television on society, Ernest Callenbach's novel "Ecotopia", Edward Abbey's fiction and non-fiction writings, and E.F. Schumacher's economics book "Small Is Beautiful".


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Also in these years environmentalist global organizations arose, as Greenpeace and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The National Farmers Organization (NFO) is a producerist movement founded in 1955. It became notorious for being associated with property violence and threats committed without official approval of the organization, from a 1964 incident when two members were crushed under the rear wheels of a cattle truck, for orchestrating the withholding of commodities, and for opposition to co-ops unwilling to withhold. During withholding protests, farmers would purposely destroy food or wastefully slaughter their animals in an attempt to raise prices and gain media exposure. The NFO failed to persuade the US government to establish a quota system as is currently practiced today in the milk, cheese, eggs and poultry supply management programs in Canada.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. This is frequently cited as the first instance in US history when people in the gay community fought back against a government-sponsored system that persecuted them, and became the defining event that marked the start of the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Mod is a subculture that began in London and spread throughout Great Britain and elsewhere, eventually influencing fashions and trends in other countries, and continues today on a smaller scale. Focused on music and fashion, the subculture has its roots in a small group of stylish London-based young men in the late 1950s who were termed "modernists" because they listened to modern jazz.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Elements of the mod subculture include fashion (often tailor-made suits); music (including soul, rhythm and blues, ska, jazz, and later splintering off into rock and freakbeat after the peak Mod era); and motor scooters (usually Lambretta or Vespa). The original mod scene was associated with amphetamine-fuelled all-night dancing at clubs.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: During the early to mid-1960s, as mod grew and spread throughout the UK, certain elements of the mod scene became engaged in well-publicised clashes with members of rival subculture, rockers. The mods and rockers conflict led sociologist Stanley Cohen to use the term "moral panic" in his study about the two youth subcultures, which examined media coverage of the mod and rocker riots in the 1960s.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: By 1965, conflicts between mods and rockers began to subside and mods increasingly gravitated towards pop art and psychedelia. London became synonymous with fashion, music, and pop culture in these years, a period often referred to as "Swinging London". During this time, mod fashions spread to other countries and became popular in the United States and elsewhere—with mod now viewed less as an isolated subculture, but emblematic of the larger youth culture of the era.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: After the January 14, 1967, Human Be-In in San Francisco organized by artist Michael Bowen, the media's attention on culture was fully activated. In 1967, Scott McKenzie's rendition of the song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" brought as many as 100,000 young people from all over the world to celebrate San Francisco's "Summer of Love". While the song had originally been written by John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas to promote the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, it became an instant hit worldwide (#4 in the United States, #1 in Europe) and quickly transcended its original purpose.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: San Francisco's flower children, also called "hippies" by local newspaper columnist Herb Caen, adopted new styles of dress, experimented with psychedelic drugs, lived communally and developed a vibrant music scene. When people returned home from "The Summer of Love" these styles and behaviors spread quickly from San Francisco and Berkeley to many US and Canadian cities and European capitals. Some hippies formed communes to live as far outside of the established system as possible. This aspect of the counterculture rejected active political engagement with the mainstream and, following the dictate of Timothy Leary to "Turn on, tune in, drop out", hoped to change society by dropping out of it. Looking back on his own life (as a Harvard professor) prior to 1960, Leary interpreted it to have been that of "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis ... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: As members of the hippie movement grew older and moderated their lives and their views, and especially after US involvement in the Vietnam War ended in the mid-1970s, the counterculture was largely absorbed by the mainstream, leaving a lasting impact on philosophy, morality, music, art, alternative health and diet, lifestyle and fashion.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In addition to a new style of clothing, philosophy, art, music and various views on anti-war, and anti-establishment, some hippies decided to turn away from modern society and re-settle on ranches, or communes. The very first of communes in the United States was on a seven-acre tract of land in southeastern Colorado, named Drop City. According to Timothy Miller,


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Many of the inhabitants practiced acts like reusing trash and recycled materials to build geodesic domes for shelter and other various purposes, using various drugs like marijuana and LSD, and creating various pieces of Drop Art. After the initial success of Drop City, visitors would take the idea of communes and spread them. Another commune called "The Ranch" was very similar to the culture of Drop City, as well as new concepts like giving children of the commune extensive freedoms known as "children's rights".


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: During the 1960s, this second group of casual lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) users evolved and expanded into a subculture that extolled the mystical and religious symbolism often engendered by the drug's powerful effects, and advocated its use as a method of raising consciousness. The personalities associated with the subculture, gurus such as Timothy Leary and psychedelic rock musicians such as the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds, Janis Joplin, the Doors, and the Beatles, soon attracted a great deal of publicity, generating further interest in LSD.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The popularization of LSD outside of the medical world was hastened when individuals such as Ken Kesey participated in drug trials and liked what they saw. Tom Wolfe wrote a widely read account of these early days of LSD's entrance into the non-academic world in his book "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test", which documented the cross-country, acid-fueled voyage of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on the psychedelic bus "Furthur" and the Pranksters' later "Acid Test" LSD parties. In 1965, Sandoz laboratories stopped its still legal shipments of LSD to the United States for research and psychiatric use, after a request from the US government concerned about its use. By April 1966, LSD use had become so widespread that "Time" magazine warned about its dangers. In December 1966, the exploitation film "Hallucination Generation" was released. This was followed by "The Trip" in 1967 and "Psych-Out" in 1968.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: As most research on psychedelics began in the 1940s and 50s, heavy experimentation made its effect in the 1960s during this era of change and movement. Researchers were gaining acknowledgment and popularity with their promotion of psychedelia. This really anchored the change that counterculture instigators and followers began. Most research was conducted at top collegiate institutes, such as Harvard University.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Timothy Leary and his Harvard research team had hopes for potential changes in society. Their research began with psilocybin mushrooms and was called the Harvard Psilocybin Project. In one study known as the Concord Prison Experiment, Leary investigated the potential for psilocybin to reduce recidivism in criminals being released from prison. After the research sessions, Leary did a follow-up. He found that "75% of the turned on prisoners who were released had stayed out of jail." He believed he had solved the nation's crime problem. But with many officials skeptical, this breakthrough was not promoted.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Because of the personal experiences with these drugs Leary and his many outstanding colleagues, Aldous Huxley ("The Doors of Perception") and Alan Watts ("The Joyous Cosmology") believed that these were the mechanisms that could bring peace to not only the nation but the world. As their research continued the media followed them and published their work and documented their behavior, the trend of this counterculture drug experimentation began.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Leary made attempts to bring more organized awareness to people interested in the study of psychedelics. He confronted the Senate committee in Washington and recommended for colleges to authorize the conduction of laboratory courses in psychedelics. He noted that these courses would "end the indiscriminate use of LSD and would be the most popular and productive courses ever offered". Although these men were seeking an ultimate enlightenment, reality eventually proved that the potential they thought was there could not be reached, at least in this time. The change they sought for the world had not been permitted by the political systems of all the nations these men pursued their research in. Ram Dass states, "Tim and I actually had a chart on the wall about how soon everyone would be enlightened ... We found out that real change is harder. We downplayed the fact that the psychedelic experience isn't for everyone."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters helped shape the developing character of the 1960s counterculture when they embarked on a cross-country voyage during the summer of 1964 in a psychedelic school bus named "Furthur". Beginning in 1959, Kesey had volunteered as a research subject for medical trials financed by the CIA's "MK ULTRA" project. These trials tested the effects of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and other psychedelic drugs. After the medical trials, Kesey continued experimenting on his own, and involved many close friends; collectively they became known as the "Merry Pranksters". The Pranksters visited Harvard LSD proponent Timothy Leary at his Millbrook, New York, retreat, and experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic drugs, primarily as a means for internal reflection and personal growth, became a constant during the Prankster trip.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The Pranksters created a direct link between the 1950s Beat Generation and the 1960s psychedelic scene; the bus was driven by Beat icon Neal Cassady, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was on board for a time, and they dropped in on Cassady's friend, Beat author Jack Kerouac—though Kerouac declined to participate in the Prankster scene. After the Pranksters returned to California, they popularized the use of LSD at so-called "Acid Tests", which initially were held at Kesey's home in La Honda, California, and then at many other West Coast venues. The cross country trip and Prankster experiments were documented in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test", a masterpiece of New Journalism.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Experimentation with LSD, DMT, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, MDA, marijuana, and other psychedelic drugs became a major component of 1960s counterculture, influencing philosophy, art, music and styles of dress. Jim DeRogatis wrote that peyote, a small cactus containing the psychedelic alkaloid mescaline, was widely available in Austin, Texas, a countercultural hub in the early 1960s.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The sexual revolution (also known as a time of "sexual liberation") was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the 1960s to the 1980s. Contraception and the pill, public nudity, the normalization of premarital sex, homosexuality and alternative forms of sexuality, and the legalization of abortion all followed.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Underground newspapers sprang up in most cities and college towns, serving to define and communicate the range of phenomena that defined the counterculture: radical political opposition to "The Establishment", colorful experimental (and often explicitly drug-influenced) approaches to art, music and cinema, and uninhibited indulgence in sex and drugs as a symbol of freedom. The papers also often included comic strips, from which the underground comix were an outgrowth.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: As numbers of young people became alienated from social norms, they resisted and looked for alternatives. The forms of escape and resistance manifest in many ways including social activism, alternative lifestyles, dress, music and alternative recreational activities, including that of throwing a Frisbee. From hippies tossing the Frisbee at festivals and concerts came today's popular disc sports. Disc sports such as disc freestyle, double disc court, disc guts, Ultimate and disc golf became this sport's first events.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The Situationist International was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented general wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France. With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th-century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the "construction of situations", namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and psychogeography. They fought against the main obstacle on the fulfillment of such superior passional living, identified by them in advanced capitalism. Their theoretical work peaked on the highly influential book "The Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord. Debord argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life. Raoul Vaneigem wrote "The Revolution of Everyday Life" which takes the field of "everyday life" as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseudo-forms.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Fluxus (a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow") is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music, visual art, literature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is often described as intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in a famous 1966 essay. Fluxus encouraged a "do-it-yourself" aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. As Fluxus artist Robert Filliou wrote, however, Fluxus differed from Dada in its richer set of aspirations, and the positive social and communitarian aspirations of Fluxus far outweighed the anti-art tendency that also marked the group.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In the 1960s, the Dada-influenced art group Black Mask declared that revolutionary art should be "an integral part of life, as in primitive society, and not an appendage to wealth." Black Mask disrupted cultural events in New York by giving made up flyers of art events to the homeless with the lure of free drinks. After, the Motherfuckers grew out of a combination of Black Mask and another group called Angry Arts. Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (often referred to as simply "the Motherfuckers", or UAW/MF) was an anarchist affinity group based in New York City.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Bob Dylan's early career as a protest singer had been inspired by his hero Woody Guthrie, and his iconic lyrics and protest anthems helped propel the Folk Revival of the 1960s, which was arguably the first major sub-movement of the Counterculture. Although Dylan was first popular for his protest music. the song Mr. Tambourine Man saw a stylistic shift in Dylan's work, from topical to abstract and imaginative, included some of the first uses of surrealistic imagery in popular music and has been viewed as a call to drugs such as LSD.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The Beach Boys' 1966 album "Pet Sounds" served as a major source of inspiration for other contemporary acts, most notably directly inspiring the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". The single "Good Vibrations" soared to number one globally, completely changing the perception of what a record could be. It was during this period that the highly anticipated album "Smile" was to be released. However, the project collapsed and The Beach Boys released a stripped down and reimagined version called "Smiley Smile", which failed to make a big commercial impact but was also highly influential, most notably on The Who's Pete Townshend.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The Beatles went on to become the most prominent commercial exponents of the "psychedelic revolution" (e.g., "Revolver", "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Magical Mystery Tour") in the late 1960s.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Detroit's MC5 also came out of the underground rock music scene of the late 1960s. They introduced a more aggressive evolution of garage rock which was often fused with sociopolitical and countercultural lyrics of the era, such as in the song "Motor City Is Burning" (a John Lee Hooker cover adapting the story of the Detroit Race Riot of 1943 to the Detroit riot of 1967). MC5 had ties to radical leftist organizations such as "Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers" and John Sinclair's White Panther Party.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Another hotbed of the 1960s counterculture was Austin, Texas, with two of the era's legendary music venues-the Vulcan Gas Company and the Armadillo World Headquarters-and musical talent like Janis Joplin, the 13th Floor Elevators, Shiva's Headband, the Conqueroo, and, later, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Austin was also home to a large New Left activist movement, one of the earliest underground papers, The Rag, and cutting edge graphic artists like Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers creator Gilbert Shelton, underground comix pioneer Jack Jackson (Jaxon), and surrealist armadillo artist Jim Franklin.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The 1960s was also an era of rock festivals, which played an important role in spreading the counterculture across the US. The Monterey Pop Festival, which launched Hendrix's career in the US, was one of the first of these festivals. The 1969 Woodstock Festival in New York state became a symbol of the movement, although the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival drew a larger crowd. Some believe the era came to an abrupt end with the infamous Altamont Free Concert held by the Rolling Stones, in which heavy-handed security from the Hells Angels resulted in the stabbing of an audience member, apparently in self-defense, as the show descended into chaos.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The 1960s saw the protest song gain a sense of political self-importance, with Phil Ochs's "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and Country Joe and the Fish's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die-Rag" among the many anti-war anthems that were important to the era.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Free jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the music produced by free jazz composers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s. Each in their own way, free jazz musicians attempted to alter, extend, or break down the conventions of jazz, often by discarding hitherto invariable features of jazz, such as fixed chord changes or tempos. While usually considered experimental and avant-garde, free jazz has also oppositely been conceived as an attempt to return jazz to its "primitive", often religious roots, and emphasis on collective improvisation. Free jazz is strongly associated with the 1950s innovations of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor and the later works of saxophonist John Coltrane. Other important pioneers included Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Joe Maneri and Sun Ra. Although today "free jazz" is the generally used term, many other terms were used to describe the loosely defined movement, including "avant-garde", "energy music" and "The New Thing". During its early and mid-60s heyday, much free jazz was released by established labels such as Prestige, Blue Note and Impulse, as well as independents such as ESP Disk and BYG Actuel. Free improvisation or "free music" is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician(s) involved. The term can refer to both a technique (employed by any musician in any genre) and as a recognizable genre in its own right. Free improvisation, as a genre of music, developed in the US and Europe in the mid- to late 1960s, largely as an outgrowth of free jazz and modern classical musics. None of its primary exponents can be said to be famous within mainstream; however, in experimental circles, a number of free musicians are well known, including saxophonists Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, Peter Brötzmann and John Zorn, drummer Christian Lillinger, trombonist George E. Lewis, guitarists Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser and Fred Frith and the improvising groups The Art Ensemble of Chicago and AMM.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: AllMusic Guide states that "until around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate". The term, "jazz-rock" (or "jazz/rock") is often used as a synonym for the term "jazz fusion". However, some make a distinction between the two terms. The Free Spirits have sometimes been cited as the earliest jazz-rock band. During the late 1960s, at the same time that jazz musicians were experimenting with rock rhythms and electric instruments, rock groups such as Cream and the Grateful Dead were "beginning to incorporate elements of jazz into their music" by "experimenting with extended free-form improvisation". Other "groups such as Blood, Sweat & Tears directly borrowed harmonic, melodic, rhythmic and instrumentational elements from the jazz tradition". The rock groups that drew on jazz ideas (like Soft Machine, Colosseum, Caravan, Nucleus, Chicago, Spirit and Frank Zappa) turned the blend of the two styles with electric instruments. Since rock often emphasized directness and simplicity over virtuosity, jazz-rock generally grew out of the most artistically ambitious rock subgenres of the late 1960s and early 70s: psychedelia, progressive rock, and the singer-songwriter movement. Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew" sessions, recorded in August 1969 and released the following year, mostly abandoned jazz's usual swing beat in favor of a rock-style backbeat anchored by electric bass grooves. The recording "mixed free jazz blowing by a large ensemble with electronic keyboards and guitar, plus a dense mix of percussion." Davis also drew on the rock influence by playing his trumpet through electronic effects and pedals. While the album gave Davis a gold record, the use of electric instruments and rock beats created a great deal of consternation amongst some more conservative jazz critics.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The counterculture was not only affected by cinema, but was also instrumental in the provision of era-relevant content and talent for the film industry. "Bonnie and Clyde" struck a chord with the youth as "the alienation of the young in the 1960s was comparable to the director's image of the 1930s." Films of this time also focused on the changes happening in the world. A sign of this was the visibility that the hippie subculture gained in various mainstream and underground media. Hippie exploitation films are 1960s exploitation films about the hippie counterculture with stereotypical situations associated with the movement such as marijuana and LSD use, sex and wild psychedelic parties. Examples include "The Love-ins", "Psych-Out", "The Trip", and "Wild in the Streets". The musical play "Hair" shocked stage audiences with full-frontal nudity. Dennis Hopper's "Road Trip" adventure "Easy Rider" (1969) became accepted as one of the landmark films of the era. "Medium Cool" portrayed the 1968 Democratic Convention alongside the 1968 Chicago police riots.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Inaugurated by the 1969 release of Andy Warhol "Blue Movie", the phenomenon of adult erotic films being publicly discussed by celebrities (like Johnny Carson and Bob Hope), and taken seriously by critics (like Roger Ebert), a development referred to, by Ralph Blumenthal of "The New York Times", as "porno chic", and later known as the Golden Age of Porn, began, for the first time, in modern American culture. According to award-winning author Toni Bentley, Radley Metzger 1976 film "The Opening of Misty Beethoven", based on the play "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw (and its derivative, "My Fair Lady"), is considered the "crown jewel" of this 'Golden Age'.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In France the New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm and is an example of European art cinema. Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm. The Left Bank, or "Rive Gauche", group is a contingent of filmmakers associated with the French New Wave, first identified as such by Richard Roud. The corresponding "right bank" group comprises the more famous and financially successful New Wave directors associated with "Cahiers du cinéma" (Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard). Left Bank directors include Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda. Roud described a distinctive "fondness for a kind of Bohemian life and an impatience with the conformity of the Right Bank, a high degree of involvement in literature and the plastic arts, and a consequent interest in experimental filmmaking", as well as an identification with the political left. Other film "new waves" from around the world associated with the 1960s are New German Cinema, Czechoslovak New Wave, Brazilian Cinema Novo and Japanese New Wave. During the 1960s, the term "art film" began to be much more widely used in the United States than in Europe. In the US, the term is often defined very broadly, to include foreign-language (non-English) "auteur" films, independent films, experimental films, documentaries and short films. In the 1960s "art film" became a euphemism in the US for racy Italian and French B-movies. By the 1970s, the term was used to describe sexually explicit European films with artistic structure such as the Swedish film "I Am Curious (Yellow)". The 1960s was an important period in art film; the release of a number of groundbreaking films giving rise to the European art cinema which had countercultural traits in filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Buñuel and Bernardo Bertolucci.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Cultural historians—such as Theodore Roszak in his 1986 essay "From Satori to Silicon Valley" and John Markoff in his book "What the Dormouse Said", have pointed out that many of the early pioneers of personal computing emerged from within the West Coast counterculture. Many early computing and networking pioneers, after discovering LSD and roaming the campuses of UC Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would emerge from this caste of social "misfits" to shape the modern world of technology, especially in Silicon Valley.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Many hippies rejected mainstream organized religion in favor of a more personal spiritual experience, often drawing on indigenous and folk beliefs. If they adhered to mainstream faiths, hippies were likely to embrace Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, Unitarian Universalism and the restorationist Christianity of the Jesus Movement. Some hippies embraced neo-paganism, especially Wicca. Wicca is a witchcraft religion which became more prominent beginning in 1951, with the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of 1735, after which Gerald Gardner and then others such as Charles Cardell and Cecil Williamson began publicising their own versions of the Craft. Gardner and others never used the term "Wicca" as a religious identifier, simply referring to the "witch cult", "witchcraft", and the "Old Religion". However, Gardner did refer to witches as "the Wica". During the 1960s, the name of the religion normalised to "Wicca". Gardner's tradition, later termed Gardnerianism, soon became the dominant form in England and spread to other parts of the British Isles. Following Gardner's death in 1964, the Craft continued to grow unabated despite sensationalism and negative portrayals in British tabloids, with new traditions being propagated by figures like Robert Cochrane, Sybil Leek and most importantly Alex Sanders, whose Alexandrian Wicca, which was predominantly based upon Gardnerian Wicca, albeit with an emphasis placed on ceremonial magic, spread quickly and gained much media attention.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In his 1991 book, "Hippies and American Values", Timothy Miller described the hippie ethos as essentially a "religious movement" whose goal was to transcend the limitations of mainstream religious institutions. "Like many dissenting religions, the hippies were enormously hostile to the religious institutions of the dominant culture, and they tried to find new and adequate ways to do the tasks the dominant religions failed to perform." In his seminal, contemporaneous work, "The Hippie Trip", author Lewis Yablonsky notes that those who were most respected in hippie settings were the spiritual leaders, the so-called "high priests" who emerged during that era.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: One such hippie "high priest" was San Francisco State College instructor Stephen Gaskin. Beginning in 1966, Gaskin's "Monday Night Class" eventually outgrew the lecture hall, and attracted 1,500 hippie followers in an open discussion of spiritual values, drawing from Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu teachings. In 1970, Gaskin founded a Tennessee community called The Farm, and he still lists his religion as "Hippie".


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Timothy Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. On September 19, 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as its holy sacrament, in part as an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the use of LSD and other psychedelics for the religion's adherents based on a "freedom of religion" argument. "The Psychedelic Experience" was the inspiration for John Lennon's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" in The Beatles' album "Revolver". He published a pamphlet in 1967 called "Start Your Own Religion" to encourage just that (see below under "writings") and was invited to attend the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In a gathering of 30,000 hippies in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park In speaking to the group, he coined the famous phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out".


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The "Principia Discordia" is the founding text of Discordianism written by Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger) and Kerry Wendell Thornley (Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst). It was originally published under the title "Principia Discordia or How The West Was Lost" in a limited edition of five copies in 1965. The title, literally meaning "Discordant Principles", is in keeping with the tendency of Latin to prefer hypotactic grammatical arrangements. In English, one would expect the title to be "Principles of Discord".


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The lasting impact (including unintended consequences), creative output, and general legacy of the counterculture era continue to be actively discussed, debated, despised and celebrated.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Even the notions of when the counterculture subsumed the Beat Generation, when it gave way to the successor generation, and what happened in between are open for debate. According to notable UK Underground and counterculture author Barry Miles, "It seemed to me that the Seventies was when most of the things that people attribute to the sixties really happened: this was the age of extremes, people took more drugs, had longer hair, weirder clothes, had more sex, protested more violently and encountered more opposition from the establishment. It was the era of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, as Ian Dury said. The countercultural explosion of the 1960s really only involved a few thousand people in the UK and perhaps ten times that in the USA—largely because of opposition to the Vietnam war, whereas in the Seventies the ideas had spread out across the world.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: A Columbia University teaching unit on the counterculture era notes: "Although historians disagree over the influence of the counterculture on American politics and society, most describe the counterculture in similar terms. Virtually all authors—for example, on the right, Robert Bork in "Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline" (New York: Regan Books,1996) and, on the left, Todd Gitlin in "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage" (New York: Bantam Books, 1987)—characterize the counterculture as self-indulgent, childish, irrational, narcissistic, and even dangerous. Even so, many liberal and leftist historians find constructive elements in it, while those on the right tend not to."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Screen legend John Wayne equated aspects of 1960s social programs with the rise of the welfare state, "I know all about that. In the late Twenties, when I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist myself—but not when I left. The average college kid idealistically wishes everybody could have ice cream and cake for every meal. But as he gets older and gives more thought to his and his fellow man's responsibilities, he finds that it can't work out that way—that some people just won't carry their load ... I believe in welfare—a welfare work program. I don't think a fella should be able to sit on his backside and receive welfare. I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living. I'd like to know why they make excuses for cowards who spit in the faces of the police and then run behind the judicial sob sisters. I can't understand these people who carry placards to save the life of some criminal, yet have no thought for the innocent victim."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Former liberal Democrat Ronald Reagan, who later became a conservative Governor of California and 40th President of the US, remarked about one group of protesters carrying signs, "The last bunch of pickets were carrying signs that said 'Make love, not war.' The only trouble was they didn't look capable of doing either."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The "generation gap" between the affluent young and their often poverty-scarred parents was a critical component of 1960s culture. In an interview with journalist Gloria Steinem during the 1968 US presidential campaign, soon-to-be First Lady Pat Nixon exposed the generational chasm in worldview between Steinem, 20 years her junior, and herself after Steinem probed Mrs. Nixon as to her youth, role models, and lifestyle. A hardscrabble child of the Great Depression, Pat Nixon told Steinem, "I never had time to think about things like that, who I wanted to be, or who I admired, or to have ideas. I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I had to work. I haven't just sat back and thought of myself or my ideas or what I wanted to do ... I've kept working. I don't have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I never had it easy. I'm not at all like you ... all those people who had it easy."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In economic terms, it has been contended that the counterculture really only amounted to creating new marketing segments for the "hip" crowd.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Even before the counterculture movement reached its peak of influence, the concept of the adoption of socially-responsible policies by establishment corporations was discussed by economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman (1962): "Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundation of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine. If businessmen do have a social responsibility other than making maximum profits for stockholders, how are they to know what it is? Can self-selected private individuals decide what the social interest is?"


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In 2003, author and former Free Speech activist Greil Marcus was quoted, "What happened four decades ago is history. It's not just a blip in the history of trends. Whoever shows up at a march against war in Iraq, it always takes place with a memory of the efficacy and joy and gratification of similar protests that took place in years before ... It doesn't matter that there is no counterculture, because counterculture of the past gives people a sense that their own difference matters."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: When asked about the prospects of the counterculture movement moving forward in the digital age, former Grateful Dead lyricist and self-styled "cyberlibertarian" John Perry Barlow said, "I started out as a teenage beatnik and then became a hippie and then became a cyberpunk. And now I'm still a member of the counterculture, but I don't know what to call that. And I'd been inclined to think that that was a good thing, because once the counterculture in America gets a name then the media can coopt it, and the advertising industry can turn it into a marketing foil. But you know, right now I'm not sure that it is a good thing, because we don't have any flag to rally around. Without a name there may be no coherent movement."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: During the era, conservative students objected to the counterculture and found ways to celebrate their conservative ideals by reading books like J. Edgar Hoover's "A Study of Communism", joining student organizations like the College Republicans, and organizing Greek events which reinforced gender norms.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Free speech advocate and social anthropologist Jentri Anders observed that a number of freedoms were endorsed within a countercultural community in which she lived and studied: "freedom to explore one's potential, freedom to create one's Self, freedom of personal expression, freedom from scheduling, freedom from rigidly defined roles and hierarchical statuses". Additionally, Anders believed some in the counterculture wished to modify children's education so that it didn't discourage, but rather encouraged, "aesthetic sense, love of nature, passion for music, desire for reflection, or strongly marked independence."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: In 2007, Merry Prankster Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia commented, "I see remnants of that movement everywhere. It's sort of like the nuts in Ben and Jerry's ice cream—it's so thoroughly mixed in, we sort of expect it. The nice thing is that eccentricity is no longer so foreign. We've embraced diversity in a lot of ways in this country. I do think it's done us a tremendous service."


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The 1990 Oscar-nominated documentary film "Berkeley in the Sixties" highlighted what Owen Gleiberman from "Entertainment Weekly" noted:


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Films like "Return of the Secaucus 7" and "The Big Chill" tackled life of the idealistic Boomers from the countercultural 1960s to their older selfs in the 80s alongside the TV series "thirtysomething". That generation's nostalgia for said decade was also criticized as well.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: Panos Cosmatos, director of the 2010 film "Beyond the Black Rainbow", admits a dislike for Baby Boomers' New Age spiritual ideals, an issue he addresses in his film. The use of psychedelic drugs for mind-expansion purposes is also explored, although Cosmatos' take on it is "dark and disturbing", a "brand of psychedelia that stands in direct opposition to the flower child, magic mushroom peace trip" wrote a reviewer describing one of the characters who happened to be a Boomer:


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: The following people are well known for their involvement in 1960s era counterculture. Some are key incidental or contextual figures, such as Beat Generation figures who also participated directly in the later counterculture era. The primary area(s) of each figure's notability are indicated, per these figures' Wikipedia pages.


title: Counterculture of the 1960s

text: This section is not intended be exhaustive, but rather a representative cross section of individuals active within the larger movement. Although many of the people listed are known for civil rights activism, some figures whose primary notability was within the realm of the Civil Rights Movement are listed elsewhere. This section is not intended to create associations between any of the listed figures beyond what is documented elsewhere. (see also: List of civil rights leaders; Key figures of the New Left; Timeline of 1960s counterculture).


title: Akkadian language

text: Akkadian (, Akkadian: ) is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia (Akkad, Assyria, Isin, Larsa and Babylonia) from the third millennium BC until its gradual replacement by Akkadian-influenced Old Aramaic among Mesopotamians by the 8th century BC.


title: Akkadian language

text: It is the earliest documented Semitic language. It used the cuneiform script, which was originally used to write the unrelated, and also extinct, Sumerian (which is a language isolate). Akkadian is named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC). The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a "Sprachbund".


title: Akkadian language

text: Akkadian proper names were first attested in Sumerian texts from around the mid 3rd-millennium BC. From about the 25th or 24th century BC, texts fully written in Akkadian begin to appear. By the 10th century BC, two variant forms of the language were in use in Assyria and Babylonia, known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively. The bulk of preserved material is from this later period, corresponding to the Near Eastern Iron Age. In total, hundreds of thousands of texts and text fragments have been excavated, covering a vast textual tradition of mythological narrative, legal texts, scientific works, correspondence, political and military events, and many other examples.


title: Akkadian language

text: Centuries after the fall of the Akkadian Empire, Akkadian (in its Assyrian and Babylonian varieties) was the native language of the Mesopotamian empires (Old Assyrian Empire, Babylonia, Middle Assyrian Empire) throughout the later Bronze Age, and became the lingua franca of much of the Ancient Near East by the time of the Bronze Age collapse c. 1150 BC. Its decline began in the Iron Age, during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, by about the 8th century BC (Tiglath-Pileser III), in favour of Old Aramaic. By the Hellenistic period, the language was largely confined to scholars and priests working in temples in Assyria and Babylonia. The last known Akkadian cuneiform document dates from the 1st century AD. Mandaic and Assyrian are two (Northwest Semitic) Neo-Aramaic languages that retain some Akkadian vocabulary and grammatical features.


title: Akkadian language

text: Akkadian is a fusional language with grammatical case; and like all Semitic languages, Akkadian uses the system of consonantal roots. The Kültepe texts, which were written in Old Assyrian, include Hittite loanwords and names, which constitute the oldest record of any Indo-European language.


title: Akkadian language

text: Akkadian belongs with the other Semitic languages in the Near Eastern branch of the Afroasiatic languages, a family native to the Middle East, Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, parts of Anatolia, North Africa, Malta, Canary Islands and parts of West Africa (Hausa). Akkadian and its successor Aramaic, however, are only ever attested in Mesopotamia and the Near East.


title: Akkadian language

text: Within the Near Eastern Semitic languages, Akkadian forms an East Semitic subgroup (with Eblaite). This group distinguishes itself from the Northwest and South Semitic languages by its subject–object–verb word order, while the other Semitic languages usually have either a verb–subject–object or subject–verb–object order.


title: Akkadian language

text: Additionally Akkadian is the only Semitic language to use the prepositions "ina" and "ana" (locative case, English "in"/"on"/"with", and dative-locative case, "for"/"to", respectively). Other Semitic languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic have the prepositions "bi/bə" and "li/lə" (locative and dative, respectively). The origin of the Akkadian spatial prepositions is unknown.


title: Akkadian language

text: In contrast to most other Semitic languages, Akkadian has only one non-sibilant fricative: ḫ . Akkadian lost both the glottal and pharyngeal fricatives, which are characteristic of the other Semitic languages. Until the Old Babylonian period, the Akkadian sibilants were exclusively affricated.


title: Akkadian language

text: Old Akkadian is preserved on clay tablets dating back to c. 2500 BC. It was written using cuneiform, a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed in wet clay. As employed by Akkadian scribes, the adapted cuneiform script could represent either (a) Sumerian logograms ("i.e.", picture-based characters representing entire words), (b) Sumerian syllables, (c) Akkadian syllables, or (d) phonetic complements. However, in Akkadian the script practically became a fully fledged syllabic script, and the original logographic nature of cuneiform became secondary, though logograms for frequent words such as 'god' and 'temple' continued to be used. For this reason, the sign "AN" can on the one hand be a logogram for the word "ilum" ('god') and on the other signify the god Anu or even the syllable "-an-". Additionally, this sign was used as a determinative for divine names.


title: Akkadian language

text: Another peculiarity of Akkadian cuneiform is that many signs do not have a well-defined phonetic value. Certain signs, such as ', do not distinguish between the different vowel qualities. Nor is there any coordination in the other direction; the syllable ', for example, is rendered by the sign ', but also by the sign '. Both of these are often used for the same syllable in the same text.


title: Akkadian language

text: Cuneiform was in many ways unsuited to Akkadian: among its flaws was its inability to represent important phonemes in Semitic, including a glottal stop, pharyngeals, and emphatic consonants. In addition, cuneiform was a syllabary writing system—i.e., a consonant plus vowel comprised one writing unit—frequently inappropriate for a Semitic language made up of triconsonantal roots (i.e., three consonants plus any vowels).


title: Akkadian language

text: One of the earliest known Akkadian inscriptions was found on a bowl at Ur, addressed to the very early pre-Sargonic king Meskiagnunna of Ur (c. 2485–2450 BC) by his queen Gan-saman, who is thought to have been from Akkad. The Akkadian Empire, established by Sargon of Akkad, introduced the Akkadian language (the "language of Akkad") as a written language, adapting Sumerian cuneiform orthography for the purpose. During the Middle Bronze Age (Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian period), the language virtually displaced Sumerian, which is assumed to have been extinct as a living language by the 18th century BC.


title: Akkadian language

text: Old Akkadian, which was used until the end of the 3rd millennium BC, differed from both Babylonian and Assyrian, and was displaced by these dialects. By the 21st century BC Babylonian and Assyrian, which were to become the primary dialects, were easily distinguishable. Old Babylonian, along with the closely related dialect Mariotic, is clearly more innovative than the Old Assyrian dialect and the more distantly related Eblaite language. For this reason, forms like "lu-prus" ('I will decide') were first encountered in Old Babylonian instead of the older "la-prus". While generally more archaic, Assyrian developed certain innovations as well, such as the "Assyrian vowel harmony". Eblaite was even more so, retaining a productive dual and a relative pronoun declined in case, number and gender. Both of these had already disappeared in Old Akkadian. Over 20,000 cuneiform tablets in Old Assyrian have been recovered from the Kültepe site in Anatolia.


title: Akkadian language

text: Most of the archaeological evidence is typical of Anatolia rather than of Assyria, but the use both of cuneiform and the dialect is the best indication of Assyrian presence.


title: Akkadian language

text: Old Babylonian was the language of king Hammurabi and his code, which is one of the oldest collections of laws in the world. (see Code of Ur-Nammu.) The Middle Babylonian (or Assyrian) period started in the 16th century BC. The division is marked by the Kassite invasion of Babylonia around 1550 BC. The Kassites, who reigned for 300 years, gave up their own language in favor of Akkadian, but they had little influence on the language. At its apogee, Middle Babylonian was the written language of diplomacy of the entire Ancient Near East, including Egypt. During this period, a large number of loan words were included in the language from Northwest Semitic languages and Hurrian; however, the use of these words was confined to the fringes of the Akkadian-speaking territory.


title: Akkadian language

text: Middle Assyrian served as a "lingua franca" in much of the Ancient Near East of the Late Bronze Age (Amarna Period). During the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Neo-Assyrian began to turn into a chancellery language, being marginalized by Old Aramaic. Under the Achaemenids, Aramaic continued to prosper, but Assyrian continued its decline. The language's final demise came about during the Hellenistic period when it was further marginalized by Koine Greek, even though Neo-Assyrian cuneiform remained in use in literary tradition well into Parthian times. The latest known text in cuneiform Babylonian is an astronomical almanac dated to 79/80 AD. However, the latest cuneiform texts are almost entirely written in Sumerian logograms.


title: Akkadian language

text: Old Assyrian developed as well during the second millennium BC, but because it was a purely popular language — kings wrote in Babylonian — few long texts are preserved. From 1500 BC onwards, the language is termed Middle Assyrian.


title: Akkadian language

text: During the first millennium BC, Akkadian progressively lost its status as a "lingua franca". In the beginning, from around 1000 BC, Akkadian and Aramaic were of equal status, as can be seen in the number of copied texts: clay tablets were written in Akkadian, while scribes writing on papyrus and leather used Aramaic. From this period on, one speaks of Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian. Neo-Assyrian received an upswing in popularity in the 10th century BC when the Assyrian kingdom became a major power with the Neo-Assyrian Empire, but texts written 'exclusively' in Neo-Assyrian disappear within 10 years of Nineveh's destruction in 612 BC. The dominance of the Neo-Assyrian Empire under Tiglath-Pileser III over Aram-Damascus in the middle of the 8th century led to the establishment of Aramaic as a "lingua franca" of the empire, rather than it being eclipsed by Akkadian.


title: Akkadian language

text: After the end of the Mesopotamian kingdoms, which were conquered by the Persians, Akkadian (which existed solely in the form of Late Babylonian) disappeared as a popular language. However, the language was still used in its written form; and even after the Greek invasion under Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Akkadian was still a contender as a written language, but spoken Akkadian was likely extinct by this time, or at least rarely used. The last positively identified Akkadian text comes from the 1st century AD.


title: Akkadian language

text: The Akkadian language began to be rediscovered when Carsten Niebuhr in 1767 was able to make extensive copies of cuneiform texts and published them in Denmark. The deciphering of the texts started immediately, and bilinguals, in particular Old Persian-Akkadian bilinguals, were of great help. Since the texts contained several royal names, isolated signs could be identified, and were presented in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend. By this time it was already evident that Akkadian was a Semitic language, and the final breakthrough in deciphering the language came from Edward Hincks, Henry Rawlinson and Jules Oppert in the middle of the 19th century.


title: Akkadian language

text: Some researchers (such as W. Sommerfeld 2003) believe that the Old Akkadian variant used in the older texts is not an ancestor of the later Assyrian and Babylonian dialects, but rather a separate dialect that was replaced by these two dialects and which died out early.


title: Akkadian language

text: Eblaite, formerly thought of as yet another Akkadian dialect, is now generally considered a separate East Semitic language.


title: Akkadian language

text: Because Akkadian as a spoken language is extinct and no contemporary descriptions of the pronunciation are known, little can be said with certainty about the phonetics and phonology of Akkadian. Some conclusions can be made, however, due to the relationship to the other Semitic languages and variant spellings of Akkadian words.


title: Akkadian language

text: The following table presents the consonants of the Akkadian language, as distinguished in Akkadian cuneiform. The reconstructed phonetic value of a phoneme is given in IPA transcription, alongside its standard (DMG-Umschrift) transliteration in angle brackets .


title: Akkadian language

text: Akkadian emphatic consonants are typically reconstructed as ejectives, which are thought to be the oldest realization of emphatics across the Semitic languages. One piece of evidence for this is that Akkadian shows a development known as Geers' law, where one of two emphatic consonants dissimilates to the corresponding non-emphatic consonant. For the sibilants, traditionally /š/ has been held to be postalveolar , and /s/, /z/, // analyzed as fricatives; but attested assimilations in Akkadian suggest otherwise. For example, when the possessive suffix "-šu" is added to the root "awat" ('word'), it is written "awassu" ('his word') even though "šš" would be expected. The most straightforward interpretation of this shift from "tš" to "ss" is that /s, ṣ/ form a pair of voiceless alveolar affricates , *š is a voiceless alveolar fricative , and *z is a voiced alveolar affricate or fricative . The assimilation is then [awat+su] > . In this vein, an alternative transcription of *š is *s̠, with the macron below indicating a soft (lenis) articulation in Semitic transcription. Other interpretations are possible, however. could have been assimilated to the preceding , yielding , which would later have been simplified to .


title: Akkadian language

text: The phoneme /r/ has traditionally been interpreted as a trill but its pattern of alternation with // suggests it was a velar (or uvular) fricative. In the Hellenistic period, Akkadian /r/ was transcribed using the Greek ρ, indicating it was pronounced similarly as an alveolar trill (though Greeks may also have perceived a uvular trill as ρ).


title: Akkadian language

text: Several Proto-Semitic phonemes are lost in Akkadian. The Proto-Semitic glottal stop , as well as the fricatives , , are lost as consonants, either by sound change or orthographically, but they gave rise to the vowel quality "e" not exhibited in Proto-Semitic. The voiceless lateral fricatives () merged with the sibilants as in Canaanite, leaving 19 consonantal phonemes. Old Akkadian preserved the /*ś/ phoneme longest but it eventually merged with /*š/, beginning in the Old Babylonian period. The following table shows Proto-Semitic phonemes and their correspondences among Akkadian, Modern Standard Arabic and Tiberian Hebrew:


title: Akkadian language

text: The existence of a back mid-vowel has been proposed, but the cuneiform writing gives no good proof for this. There is limited contrast between different u-signs in lexical texts, but this scribal differentiation may reflect the superimposition of the Sumerian phonological system (for which an /o/ phoneme has also been proposed), rather than a separate phoneme in Akkadian.


title: Akkadian language

text: All consonants and vowels appear in long and short forms. Long consonants are represented in writing as double consonants, and long vowels are written with a macron (ā, ē, ī, ū). This distinction is phonemic, and is used in the grammar, for example "iprusu" ('that he decided') versus "iprusū" ('they decided').


title: Akkadian language

text: The stress patterns of Akkadian are disputed, with some authors claiming that nothing is known of the topic. There are however certain points of reference, such as the rule of vowel syncope, and some forms in the cuneiform that might represent the stressing of certain vowels; however, attempts at identifying a rule for stress have so far been unsuccessful.


title: Akkadian language

text: Huenergard claims that stress in Akkadian is completely predictable. In his syllable typology there are three syllable weights: "light" (V, CV); "heavy" (CVC, CV̄, CV̂), and "superheavy" (CV̂C). If the last syllable is superheavy, it is stressed, otherwise the rightmost heavy non-final syllable is stressed. If a word contains only light syllables, the first syllable is stressed.


title: Akkadian language

text: A rule of Akkadian phonology is that certain short (and probably unstressed) vowels are dropped. The rule is that the last vowel of a succession of syllables that end in a short vowel is dropped, for example the declinational root of the verbal adjective of a root PRS is "PaRiS-". Thus the masculine singular nominative is "PaRS-um" (< "*PaRiS-um") but the feminine singular nominative is "PaRiStum" (< "*PaRiS-at-um"). Additionally there is a general tendency of syncope of short vowels in the later stages of Akkadian.


title: Akkadian language

text: Most roots of the Akkadian language consist of three consonants (called the radicals), but some roots are composed of four consonants (so-called quadriradicals). The radicals are occasionally represented in transcription in upper-case letters, for example "PRS" (to decide). Between and around these radicals various infixes, suffixes and prefixes, having word generating or grammatical functions, are inserted. The resulting consonant-vowel pattern differentiates the original meaning of the root. Also, the middle radical can be geminated, which is represented by a doubled consonant in transcription (and sometimes in the cuneiform writing itself).


title: Akkadian language

text: The consonants ', ', ' and ' are termed "weak radicals" and roots containing these radicals give rise to irregular forms.


title: Akkadian language

text: Formally, Akkadian has three numbers (singular, dual and plural) and three cases (nominative, accusative and genitive). However, even in the earlier stages of the language, the dual number is vestigial, and its use is largely confined to natural pairs (eyes, ears, etc.), and adjectives are never found in the dual. In the dual and plural, the accusative and genitive are merged into a single oblique case.


title: Akkadian language

text: Akkadian, unlike Arabic, has only "sound" plurals formed by means of a plural ending; broken plurals are not formed by changing the word stem. As in all Semitic languages, some masculine nouns take the prototypically feminine plural ending ("-āt").


title: Akkadian language

text: The nouns "šarrum" (king) and "šarratum" (queen) and the adjective "dannum" (strong) will serve to illustrate the case system of Akkadian.


title: Akkadian language

text: As is clear from the above table, the adjective and noun endings differ only in the masculine plural. Certain nouns, primarily those referring to geography, can also form a locative ending in "-um" in the singular and the resulting forms serve as adverbials. These forms are generally not productive, but in the Neo-Babylonian the "um"-locative replaces several constructions with the preposition "ina".


title: Akkadian language

text: In the later stages of Akkadian, the mimation (word-final "-m") and nunation (dual final "-n") that occurred at the end of most case endings disappeared, except in the locative. Later, the nominative and accusative singular of masculine nouns collapsed to "-u" and in Neo-Babylonian most word-final short vowels were dropped. As a result, case differentiation disappeared from all forms except masculine plural nouns. However, many texts continued the practice of writing the case endings, although often sporadically and incorrectly. As the most important contact language throughout this period was Aramaic, which itself lacks case distinctions, it is possible that Akkadian's loss of cases was an areal as well as phonological phenomenon.


title: Akkadian language

text: As is also the case in other Semitic languages, Akkadian nouns may appear in a variety of "states" depending on their grammatical function in a sentence. The basic form of the noun is the "status rectus" (the governed state), which is the form as described above, complete with case endings. In addition to this, Akkadian has the "status absolutus" (the absolute state) and the "status constructus" (Construct state). The latter is found in all other Semitic languages, while the former appears only in Akkadian and some dialects of Aramaic.


title: Akkadian language

text: The status absolutus is characterised by the loss of a noun's case ending (e.g. "awīl" < "awīlum", "šar" < "šarrum"). It is relatively uncommon, and is used chiefly to mark the predicate of a nominal sentence, in fixed adverbial expressions, and in expressions relating to measurements of length, weight, and the like.


title: Akkadian language

text: The status constructus is more common by far, and has a much wider range of applications. It is employed when a noun is followed by another noun in the genitive, a pronominal suffix, or a verbal clause in the subjunctive, and typically takes the "shortest form of the noun which is phonetically possible". In general, this amounts to the loss of case endings with short vowels, with the exception of the genitive -i in nouns preceding a pronominal suffix, hence:


title: Akkadian language

text: There are numerous exceptions to this general rule, usually involving potential violations of the language's phonological limitations. Most obviously, Akkadian does not tolerate word final consonant clusters, so nouns like "kalbum" (dog) and "maḫrum" (front) would have illegal construct state forms "*kalb" and "*maḫr" unless modified. In many of these instances, the first vowel of the word is simply repeated (e.g. "kalab", "maḫar"). This rule, however, does not always hold true, especially in nouns where a short vowel has historically been elided (e.g. "šaknum" < "*šakinum" "governor"). In these cases, the lost vowel is restored in the construct state (so "šaknum" yields "šakin").


title: Akkadian language

text: A genitive relation can also be expressed with the relative preposition "ša", and the noun that the genitive phrase depends on appears in status rectus.


title: Akkadian language

text: The same preposition is also used to introduce true relative clauses, in which case the verb is placed in the subjunctive mood.


title: Akkadian language

text: The Akkadian verb has six finite verb aspects (preterite, perfect, present, imperative, precative, and vetitive (the negative form of precative)) and three infinite forms (infinitive, participle and verbal adjective). The preterite is used for actions that are seen by the speaker as having occurred at a single point in time. The present is primarily imperfective in meaning and is used for concurrent and future actions as well as past actions with a temporal dimension. The final three finite forms are injunctive where the imperative and the precative together form a paradigm for positive commands and wishes, and the vetitive is used for negative wishes. Additionally the periphrastic prohibitive, formed by the present form of the verb and the negative adverb lā, is used to express negative commands. The infinitive of the Akkadian verb is a verbal noun, and in contrast to some other languages the Akkadian infinitive can be declined in case. The verbal adjective is an adjectival form and designates the state or the result of the action of the verb, and consequently the exact meaning of the verbal adjective is determined by the semantics of the verb itself. The participle, which can be active or passive, is another verbal adjective and its meaning is similar to the English gerund.


title: Akkadian language

text: The following table shows the conjugation of the G-stem verbs derived from the root PRS ("to decide") in the various verb aspects of Akkadian:


title: Akkadian language

text: The table below shows the different affixes attached to the preterite aspect of the verb root PRS "to decide"; and as can be seen, the grammatical genders differ only in the second person singular and third person plural.


title: Akkadian language

text: The following table demonstrates the verb moods of verbs derived from the root PRS ("to decide","to separate"):


title: Akkadian language

text: Akkadian verbs have thirteen separate derived stems formed on each root. The basic, underived, stem is the G-stem (from the German Grundstamm, meaning "basic stem"). Causative or intensive forms are formed with the doubled D-stem, and it gets its name from the doubled-middle radical that is characteristic of this form. The doubled middle radical is also characteristic of the present, but the forms of the D-stem use the secondary conjugational affixes, so a D-form will never be identical to a form in a different stem. The Š-stem is formed by adding a prefix "š-", and these forms are mostly causatives. Finally, the passive forms of the verb are in the N-stem, formed by adding a "n-" prefix. However the "n-" element is assimilated to a following consonant, so the original /n/ is only visible in a few forms.


title: Akkadian language

text: Furthermore, reflexive and iterative verbal stems can be derived from each of the basic stems. The reflexive stem is formed with an infix "-ta", and the derived stems are therefore called Gt, Dt, Št and Nt, and the preterite forms of the Xt-stem are identical to the perfects of the X-stem. Iteratives are formed with the infix "-tan-", giving the Gtn, Dtn, Štn and Ntn. Because of the assimilation of "n", the /n/ is only seen in the present forms, and the Xtn preterite is identical to the Xt durative.


title: Akkadian language

text: The final stem is the ŠD-stem, a form mostly attested only in poetic texts, and whose meaning is usually identical to either the Š-stem or the D-stem of the same verb. It is formed with the Š prefix (like the Š-stem) in addition to a doubled-middle radical (like the D-stem).


title: Akkadian language

text: An alternative to this naming system is a numerical system. The basic stems are numbered using Roman numerals so that G, D, Š and N become I, II, III and IV, respectively, and the infixes are numbered using Arabic numerals; 1 for the forms without an infix, 2 for the Xt, and 3 for the Xtn. The two numbers are separated using a solidus. As an example, the Štn-stem is called III/3. The most important user of this system is the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary.


title: Akkadian language

text: There is mandatory congruence between the subject of the sentence and the verb, and this is expressed by prefixes and suffixes. There are two different sets of affixes, a primary set used for the forms of the G and N-stems, and a secondary set for the D and Š-stems.


title: Akkadian language

text: The stems, their nomenclature and examples of the third-person masculine singular stative of the verb "parāsum" (root PRS: 'to decide, distinguish, separate') is shown below:


title: Akkadian language

text: A very often appearing form which can be formed by nouns, adjectives as well as by verbal adjectives is the stative. Nominal predicatives occur in the status absolutus and correspond to the verb "to be" in English. The stative in Akkadian corresponds to the Egyptian pseudo-participle. The following table contains an example of using the noun "šarrum" (king), the adjective "rapšum" (wide) and the verbal adjective "parsum" (decided).


title: Akkadian language

text: Thus, the stative in Akkadian is used to convert simple stems into effective sentences, so that the form "šarr-āta" is equivalent to: "you were king", "you are king" and "you will be king". Hence, the stative is independent of time forms.