Hippie  

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"If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair."--"San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" (1967) by John Phillips


"We blew it."


"The hippie dream of peace and love evaporated in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings (May '69), the Manson massacre (August '69), the Altamont murder (December '69), the deaths of Jimi Hendrix (September '70), Janis Joplin (October '70) and Jim Morrison (July '71). It would be another decade before the sexual revolution ended." --Sholem Stein


"It is clear that many hippie leaders became in the 1980s perfect yuppies, including the great leader Jerry Rubin, turned Reagan activist and neo-liberal convinced Republican. In France, Michel Clouscard was the main thinker to have predicted this transformation, seeing in the hippie movement a simple internal crisis of American capitalism, which far from being threatened was to emerge only stronger from these events. He crystallized this idea in his concept of "liberal-libertarian"." --Sholem Stein


"The hippie trail came to an end in the late 1970s with political changes in previously hospitable countries. In 1979, both the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan closed the overland route to Western travelers." --Sholem Stein

By the late 1960s, revolutionary Che Guevara's famous image had become a popular symbol of youth rebellion
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By the late 1960s, revolutionary Che Guevara's famous image had become a popular symbol of youth rebellion

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Hippie refers to a subgroup of the 1960s and early 1970s counterculture that found its earliest beginnings in the North American counterculture, becoming an established social group by 1965 before declining during the mid-1970s. The hippie dream of peace and love was shattered in 1970 with the events at Altamont, the Manson murders and the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

Contents

Overview

The hippie (or hippy) subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word 'hippie' came from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain, though by the 1940s both had become part of African American jive slang and meant "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date". The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation and mimicked some of the then current values of the British Mod scene. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and some used drugs such as cannabis, LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.

In January 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco popularized hippie culture, leading to the Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast.

Hippie fashions and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have been assimilated by mainstream society. The religious and cultural diversity espoused by the hippies has gained widespread acceptance, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a larger audience. The hippie legacy can be observed in contemporary culture in myriad forms, including health food, music festivals, contemporary sexual mores, and even the cyberspace revolution.

Hippie trail

One travel experience, undertaken by hundreds of thousands of hippies between 1969 and 1971, was the Hippie trail overland route to India. Carrying little or no luggage, and with small amounts of cash, almost all followed the same route, hitch-hiking across Europe to Athens and on to Istanbul, then by train through central Turkey via Erzurum, continuing by bus into Iran, via Tabriz and Tehran to Mashhad, across the Afghan border into Herat, through southern Afghanistan via Kandahar to Kabul, over the Khyber Pass into Pakistan, via Rawalpindi and Lahore to the Indian frontier. Once in India, hippies went to many different destinations, but gathered in large numbers on the beaches of Goa and Kovalam in Trivandrum (Kerala), or crossed the border into Nepal to spend months in Kathmandu. In Kathmandu, most of the hippies hung out in the tranquil surroundings of a place called Freak Street, (Nepal Bhasa: Jhoo Chhen) which still exists near Kathmandu Durbar Square.

In film

See also




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