[...] Ever since the Soviet Union first tested an atomic bomb in 1949, Americans, and particularly young Americans, had suffered under a thick cloud of nuclear anxiety. For the college students of the early 1960s, that anxiety fused with fears for their own professional futures. Thanks to the power of postwar industry, they would have no trouble finding jobs. Yet many feared that to take those jobs would be to enter the bleak ranks of the bureaucracy that had brought forth nuclear weapons and, later, the Vietnam War. “There are models of marriage and adult life, but . . . they don’t work,” recalled the same young woman who had discovered the atomic bomb in the encyclopedia. “There is that whole conflict about being professional, leading a middle-class life which none of us have been able really to resolve. How do you be an adult in this world?”

In response to this question, and to the threat of technological bureaucracy more broadly, the youth of the 1960s developed two somewhat overlapping but ultimately distinct social movements. The first grew out of the struggles for civil rights in the Deep South and the Free Speech Movement and became known as the New Left. Its members registered formerly disenfranchised voters, formed new political parties, and led years of protests against the Vietnam War. The second bubbled up out of a wide variety of cold war – era cultural springs, including Beat poetry and fiction, Zen Buddhism, action painting, and, by the mid-1960s, encounters with psychedelic drugs. If the New Left turned outward, toward political action, this wing turned inward, toward questions of consciousness and interpersonal intimacy, and toward small-scale tools such as LSD or rock music as ways to enhance both. By the end of the decade, as youth everywhere adopted its drug habits and its sartorial styles, this branch of the youth movement, and ultimately youthful protestors as a whole, came to commonly be called “the counterculture.”