Woodstock

In the 1960s protests across the country formed the backdrop for an American counterculture. Rebellion against the supposedly hidebound conservatism of the 1950s spread among the young, and the counterculture — with its music, its experiments with psychedelic drugs, and its search for personal fulfillment — increasingly reached the mainstream through popular culture and even advertising.

The festival took place weeks after Americans first walked on the Moon, against the backdrop of a nation divided over the Vietnam War, civil rights, and sexual politics. PBS describes a sense of an America in transition — a handoff between generations with very different values and ideals.

Over three days, a crowd of nearly half a million — rain-soaked, often hungry, many of them on drugs — turned a few acres of farmland into a swarming, impromptu city. PBS’s American Experience calls what happened “nothing less than a miracle of teamwork,” a demonstration of the “peace and love” the festival had promised.

To many participants and observers the weekend seemed to validate the counterculture’s promise. The festival quickly became a legend in its own right.

The American Yawp calls 1969’s Woodstock concert “shorthand for the new youth culture and its mixture of politics, protest, and personal fulfillment.” The hippies’ rise was exaggerated and short-lived, and the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon shattered much of its idealism — but the counterculture’s liberated social norms and its embrace of personal fulfillment still shape much of American culture.