Rorabaugh, W.J. Berkeley at War: The 1960s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

== Summary ==
Too
much attention by scholars, Rorabaugh contends, have focused on the national
crises, rather than delve closely into the local level and understand the
experiences from “the bottom up.” In Berkeley
at War, Rorabaugh uses Berkeley as a case study of the 1960s and argues
that the social turmoil that came to define the decade was “really a battle
over power.” He writes: “College students, young blacks, members of the New
Left, and hippies believed that power should flow from the bottom up rather
than from the top down.” (x) The sixties, according to Rorabuagh, was thus a
decade of testing, when social, political and economic assumptions came under
attack and forced institutions to respond. The FSM movement, drawing on civil
rights tactics, “established that activist students could, under certain conditions,
win victories against larger powerful bureaucracies.” (170). The liberals
failed “to recognize that the radicals could negotiate, as they lacked
institutionalized forms of power. Ironically, Rorabaugh notes, Conservatives
and radicals shared similar contempt of the liberal university and policy. “At
the heart of the contempt for liberalism on the part of both the New Right and
the New Left,” Rorarbaugh writes, “was a seldom acknowledged but growing
libertarianism.” (170) The book is broken into four chapters: “White” about the
white student movement at UC Berkeley; “Black” about the black movement within
the city; “Red” about the New and Old Left, in particular the anti-war
movement; and “Green” about Hippies in the Berkeley area.