An award-winning historian on the transformative year in the sixties that continues to reverberate in our lives and politics—for readers of Heather Cox Richardson.
If 1968 marked a turning point in a pivotal decade, 1964—or rather, the long 1964, from JFK’s assassination in November 1963 to mid-1965—was the time when the sixties truly arrived. It was then that the United States began a radical shift toward a much more inclusive definition of “American,” with a greater degree of equality and a government actively involved in social and economic improvement.
It was a radical shift accompanied by a cultural revolution. The same month Bob Dylan released his iconic ballad “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced his War on Poverty. Spurred by the civil rights movement and a generation pushing for change, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Immig
