When the hippie movement began in the mid-1960s, it seemed a curiosity. What were the Californians up to this time?
The rest of the nation was much as it had been throughout the prior decade: staid, traditional, religious, happy to be home from the war and growing young families. But what began as an outgrowth of the smaller beatnik movement spread beyond its (in)famous San Francisco intersection.
Soon, college kids across the country were coming home for Thanksgiving with ideas so revolutionary they made the Jazz Age look like a chaperoned prom. The counterculture went mainstream, the sexual revolution was well underway, illicit drug use was increasingly normalized, and the proportion of irreligious Americans—though still small—doubled in a decade.
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