Publication Date

4-15-2006

Abstract

Given the substantial amount literature on the Sixties, it is only natural that much scholarship would exist on the Students for a Democratic Society, one of its largest protest organizations. Divisions abound in literature on SDS. Some view the group as the most vital force of"the Movement," the general term for the widespread political and social counterculture that emerged in the Sixties. Others, like Andrew Hunt, contest this strong focus on SDS as the dominant protest organization of the era. Historians like Todd Gitlin make broad claims to the immense practical impact of SDS on society-"as an amalgam of reform efforts, especially for civil rights...and women's rights and the environment and against the war, it had been a formidable success." To Gitlin, SDS and the New Left only appear to have had a limited impact due to the dramatic resurgence of the right in the seventies and eighties that reversed the Movement's true to life gains. Others claim that SDS made little practical impact-that its gains were only intangibles.

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History

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