The Sociological and Political Subtleties of Woodstock
The Woodstock festival descended on Bethel, New York promising three days of peace and music. Event organizers anticipated 15,000 people would attend but were overwhelmed by the 300,000 people that flooded this rural area of New York state from August 15 -17, 1969. While these facts are well known and indisputable, the festival itself has proven to be a controversial endeavor. What began as a small business venture was soon brimming with the controversy of an entire decade. It becomes clear when examining the strikingly different accounts of the festival that reactions varied depending on the fundamental values and personal circumstances specific to each observer and to the underlying motives of the historian describing the event.
Joel Makower's Woodstock: The Oral History was particularly effective in examining Woodstock as it was experienced by the producers of the festival. The book's approach is atypical in the sense that it spends considerable time addressing exactly why and how the festival came into existence instead of droning on about drug use and mud slides. The ordeal began when John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, wealthy young entrepreneurs, placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal declaring, "Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting and legitimate business ideas."[1] Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, representing only one of the thousands of replies that Roberts and Rosenman received, proposed building a recording studio for musicians in Woodstock, New York.[2] This original idea was obviously modified and resulted in the Woodstock festival as it is known today. The book effectively details everything from the initial catalyst to the re...
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...8 August 1969, p. 25.
"The Message of History's Biggest Happening," Time, 29 August 1969, 32.
Notes
[1] Joel Makower, Woodstock: The Oral History (NY: Tilden Press Inc., 1989), 24.
[2] Makower, 28-29.
[3] Makower, 1.
[4] "Amazon.com," search for "Joel Makower". (17 February 2002).
[5] Alfonso A. Narvaez, “Bethel Farmer Call Fair a Plot ‘to Avoid the Law’,” The New York Times, 20 August 1969, p. 37.
[6] "Episcopal Archives," (17 February 2002).
[7] Michael T. Kaufman, "Generation Gap Bridged as Monticello Residents Aid Courteous Festival Patrons," The New York Times, 18 August 1969, p. 25.
[8] Narvaez, 37.
[9] "The Message of History's Biggest Happening," Time, 29 August 1969, 32.
[10] Time, 32.
[11] Time, 33.
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.
The Woodstock Music & Art Festival took place on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, August 15th, 16th, and 17th, 1969. As you can imagine, a concert like Woodstock would have had to be planned very carefully. It didn’t just happen.
...g force. One thing that I am certain of is that Woodstock, like any icon, should have never been duplicated. They attempted this in 1994 and again in 1999. Sequels never measure up to the original. People even try to imitate icons with no success. Madonna and Anna Nicole Smith both tried to be Marilyn Monroe, but there is only one Marilyn. To be able to recreate Woodstock, you would also have to be able to recreate Vietnam, The Civil Rights Movement, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The fact that Woodstock can’t be copied is what makes it an Icon. I only wish that I could have been there.
In this paper, I want to share the history of Haight Ashbury, and its transition from a small town with nice Victorian homes, to its deterioration in the 1960’s. The importance of a farm in Woodstock, to the Cultural Revolution and how it all spread from there including the role of radio and television in spreading the news of the hippie movement and how an attempt to free culture from its moral ideals and standards only led it with no standards or moral compass, and all they were left with was thought to be an idea of the Summer of Love.
Nowadays, DNA is a crucial component of a crime scene investigation, used to both to identify perpetrators from crime scenes and to determine a suspect’s guilt or innocence (Butler, 2005). The method of constructing a distinctive “fingerprint” from an individual’s DNA was first described by Alec Jeffreys in 1985. He discovered regions of repetitions of nucleotides inherent in DNA strands that differed from person to person (now known as variable number of tandem repeats, or VNTRs), and developed a technique to adjust the length variation into a definitive identity marker (Butler, 2005). Since then, DNA fingerprinting has been refined to be an indispensible source of evidence, expanded into multiple methods befitting different types of DNA samples. One of the more controversial practices of DNA forensics is familial DNA searching, which takes partial, rather than exact, matches between crime scene DNA and DNA stored in a public database as possible leads for further examination and information about the suspect. Using familial DNA searching for investigative purposes is a reliable and advantageous method to convict criminals.
In the duration of one year, 1968, the American national mood shifted from general confidence and optimism to chaotic confusion. Certainly the most turbulent twelve months of the post-WWII period and arguably one of the most disturbing episodes the country has endured since the Civil War, 1968 offers the world a glimpse into the tumultuous workings of a revolution. Although the entire epoch of the 1960's remains significant in US history, 1968 stands alone as the pivotal year of the decade; it was the moment when all of the nation's urges toward violence, sublimity, diversity, and disorder peaked to produce a transformation great enough to blanket an entire society. While some may superficially disagree, the evidence found in the Tet Offensive, race relations, and the counterculture's music of the period undeniably affirm 1968 as a turning point in American history.
Wakefield, Dan. “Justice in Sumner: Land of the Free.” The Nation 1 Oct. 1955: 284-285.
See, Scott, Mickeys and Demons vs. Bigots and Boobies: The Woodstock riot of 1847, Acadiensis, University of New Brunswick, Autumn 1991, Volume 21, Issue 1. 20 pages.
The crowd was filled with 400,000 people who were part of the counterculture generation. They watched 32 artists perform over the three-day weekend. Janis Joplin, Santana, Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix were some of the many who played for the massive crowd. Muddy roads and fields caused facilities to not be equipped to provide sanitation or first aid to the large amount of concertgoers. On Sunday, August 17th, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller called Roberts, the festival organizer, and told him he wanted to order 10,000 New York State National Guard troops to the Woodstock festival. Roberts was able to persuade Rockefeller not to order in the troops, but the Sullivan County declared a state of emergency and had the nearby Air Force Base assist in helping airlift the performers out of the grounds. Jimi Hendrix was the last performer and didn’t go on until Monday morning at 8:30. The audience was now reduced to 30,000 of those who wanted to catch a glimpse of Hendrix before leaving the
Before 1963, the music being played in the 60’s were closely reflecting the sound, style, and belief of the decades before. After 1963, many social influences changed what peopled were viewing as popular music. The assassination of Kennedy, war in Vietnam, and the Civil Rights Movement all greatly impacted the mood of American culture and how the music began to reflect change. The “British Invasion” was a time period in which many British bands and artists came to the United States, and excelled extremely well. The most famous of these bands were “The Beetles,” who would eventually go down in history as one of the most famous bands in history. At the height of the music industry in the 60’s, one single event changed American music forever. Woodstock was a three-day concert full of sex, drugs, and a lot of hippies. The organizers were only expecting about 50,000 people to show up. To their surprise, more than 400,000 appeared at the infamous dairy farm in New York. With artists like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, many were drawn to witness this phenomenon. This festival is widely known as the definitive moment for the larger counter-culture generation. The 60’s drastically revolutionized music in a way that shaped music into the powerhouse that it is for generations to
The end of the Civil War left many questions for both the North and the South. The federal government was faced with the responsibility of rebuilding the South and reuniting the country politically, economically, and culturally. At the war’s end, the country was left to grapple with 200,000 deaths and over a million casualties, more than any other war for the United States, either past or since[1]. The turbulence of the era left the countryside and the economy of the South in ruins. Plantation owners, the antebellum economic lords who ruled with an iron fist, were financially devastated by the war. Confederate currency was worthless, free slave labor was outlawed, and the federal government confiscated many acres of plantation land. In addition to rebuilding the Southern economy and its infrastructure, the federal government had to address the situation of newly freed blacks. Though Southern blacks had gained their freedom in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, they still faced great economic and social hardship as they struggled to make a living and find their niche in Southern society. While the Radical Republicans pushed for the full equality of blacks, they faced staunch opposition from Southern Democrats and more moderate Republicans. While the period of Reconstruction figured as a time of increased freedom and equality for southern blacks, it was ultimately only a temporary condition, as the power of the Southern Redeemers and the waning support of northern Republicans resulted in the reinstitution of white domination. With the end of slavery, Southern whites eventual...
From studying the science behind the San Francisco earthquake, scientists have made a number of important discoveries involving how earthquakes function. At 5:12 on a fateful April morning in 1906, the mammoth Pacific and North American plates sheared each other at an incredible twenty-one feet along the San Andreas fault, surpassing the annual average of two inches (“San Francisco Earthquake of 1906”) (“The Great 1906 Earthquake and Fires”). A few seconds later, the destructive earthquake occurred. The ground shifted at almost five feet per second, and the shaking could be felt all the way from southern Oregon to southern Los Angeles to central Nevada (“Quick”) (“The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake”). In fact, the earthquake could be registered in a seismograph on Capetown, South Africa, an astounding 10,236 miles away...
The collection of DNA in an investigation is used most often to determine who the perpetrator(s) might be in a crime. There has been a rapid growth since its inception and legal and ethical issues have arisen. In the Double –Helix Double-Edged ...
...orth of the earthquake that occurred the day before, this time I was wrong, there were