Historical Context of Bringing It All Back Home

Bringing It All Back Home (March 1965): Historical Context

Major Events:

-          War in Vietnam escalates

o   U.S bombing North Vietnam

o   U.S combat troops begin fighting in South Vietnam

-          Feb. 21^st: Malcolm X assassinated in NYC

-          Civil Rights marches/demonstrations

o   Voting Rights Act (1965): makes it easier for southern blacks to register to vote (no more literacy tests)

-          Anti-war demonstrations/marches

o   Burning draft cards becomes illegal

-          President L. B. Johnson “Great Society”

o   Eliminate poverty and racial injustice

Society/Teenagers:

-          Parents training independence in children

o   “Adults who lived through a great depression, a shattering war, an anxious peace, and the whole onslaught of existentialism are less inclined than ever to proclaim what Margaret Mead calls "parental imperatives."

-          Parents maintain same social conduct

o   "I don't get authority at home," sighs Dana Nye, 17, a student at Pacific Palisades High School in Los Angeles. "We're just a bunch of people who go about our business and live under one roof. One of these days I'd like to sit down and find out from my parents what they really believe in."

-          School retention/graduation rates are up

o   Students showing self reliance

-          Teenagers forced to mature early on in life by making own decisions

o   "Their difficulty," says Harvard Historian Laurence Wylie, "lies not in living up to expectations, but in discovering what they really are." The result, according to University of California Sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg, is "the vanishing adolescent"—made to mature earlier, yet in many ways still engagingly immature. And since "part of the American dream is to live long and die young," many adults ambivalently relish and resent the teen-ager's freedom and spontaneity. "Our whole culture believes less in authority," snaps a Detroit priest. "Yet the teen-ager is the only one criticized for not recognizing it."

-          Adolescents cut off from adult world

Dumped into a society of their peers where they all develop certain tastes and values that contrast from their parents’