Society’s Dropouts 48 Eye-Opening Photos Of America’s 1970s Hippie Communes

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, a deep-seated social discontent developed among young people in the United States. These were men who’d been forced to fight a war they didn’t believe in only to return home to a country that didn’t want them. The country was filled with college graduates lacking any job prospects, young women who refused to lead their mothers’ lives, and the myth of an “equal” society that couldn’t seem to shake it’s nasty history of segregation and inequality.


The product of this dissatisfaction was hippie culture, and from hippie culture sprang hippie communes–group living spaces, communities, or villages where like minded individuals could live simply like their agrarian ancestors (usually with the help of some mind altering substances). And, most notably, hippies placed communal needs and values above individual rights. As University of Kansas professor Timothy Miller said, “reason had run its course; now it was time to return to the mystical and intuitional…the hippies rejected the industrial for the agrarian, the plastic for the natural, the synthetic for the organic.”

Each hippie commune was different: some were deeply religious communities while others were completely secular. Drug use was rampant on some hippie communes and forbidden on others. Some were strictly self-sufficient agrarian societies, but other hippie communes participated in capitalism–owning businesses and selling rock albums. There was no “one-size fits all” model, and each hippie commune developed its own culture, rules, and personality over time.

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The dramatic boom and bust of The Golden Age

For a period of barely 100 years, The Netherlands boasted the most powerful empire in the world – a power driven by markets rather than privilege.

And one of its successful areas was its art market: the great painters Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Vermeer contributed to a cultural explosion known as The Golden Age.

And like the tiny country they lived and worked in, these painters experienced good fortune as well as bad – enjoying prestige, wealth and prosperity before falling into poverty.

Vermeer’s fortunes in particular were tied to those of the Republic: 1672, when the artist turned 40, was its ‘year of disaster’, as English, French and German forces tried to invade from different directions. The Dutch survived – but their global supremacy did not, and Vermeer also fell upon hard times before dying soon after.

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Why Beyoncé speaks for a generation

“The woman that every woman aspires to be.” That’s how one of my university peers describes Beyoncé. And she speaks for many. Few musicians today have inspired a genuine cult of personality. But Beyoncé, the undisputed wearer of pop music’s crown, has done just that. “All hail Queen Bey!” cry her horde of devoted fans, who call themselves the BeyHive, an apt name for the followers of a star who generates such deafening buzz. When she dropped her self-titled album out of the blue in December 2013, I witnessed the spectacle of ‘Beyoncé syndrome’ first hand. On a tense night during final exams, I watched in awe as my fellow students set aside term papers and study guides to get drunk – ‘drunk in love’, that is. Students swarmed to every computer in the library to watch Beyoncé gyrate across a beach and profess her love for her megastar husband Jay-Z. As an outside observer, I marveled at the new video album’s infectious effect and wondered about its cause. What makes Beyoncé so gripping? Why is her voice – in song, speech, and even silence – so resonant for so many, especially millennials?

Beyoncé is a true Renaissance woman: a musician, a business mogul, a feminist, a mother, and a brand whose cultural gravity seems to emanate not from any one of these talents but from all of them in concert.

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Mersey ferry gets the dazzle treatment from Sir Peter Blake

Seven ship painters spent 10 days covering a Mersey ferry in the reds, oranges, blues, yellows, pinks, greens, blacks and whites carefully specified by Sir Peter Blake and the one obvious thing now is that no one’s going to miss it.

“It is a crazy concept,” said Blake on board the ship he has now “dazzled” with wild colours and patterns. “They’ve done it so beautifully and it looks fantastic. It is very exciting to see it.”

The Mersey ferry Snowdrop has become the third vessel to be painted in this way in homage to the artists 100 years ago who painted British ships in “dazzle camouflage” to mislead German U-boat captains.

The organisation 14-18 Now, responsible for five years of art commissions marking the first world war centenary, estimate that 8 million people haveseen two contemporary dazzle ships that were unveiled last year on the Thames in London and on Liverpool waterfront. The Snowdrop is now the only one that will actually go anywhere.

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Burning of Temple in Londonderry takes place - BBC

The burning of a 70-foot carved wooden tower called Temple has taken place in Londonderry.

More than 15,000 people attended the event on Saturday night as the artwork was set alight in the Waterside area.

The project was the work of US artist David Best, and his aim was to offer an alternative perspective on bonfires.

He said the temple had given the people of Derry a neutral, cross-community space where they "celebrated and reflected on their losses together".
'Forgiveness and celebration'

More than 60,000 people visited the structure in the week before it was set alight, leaving hundreds of personal messages of love and loss inside the temple.

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The greatest year for books ever - BBC

The year 1925 was a golden moment in literary history.  Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Times, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were all published that year. As were Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, among others. In fact, 1925 may well be literature’s greatest year.

But how could one even go about determining the finest 12 months in publishing history? Well, first, by searching for a cluster of landmark books:  debut books or major masterpieces published that year. Next, by evaluating their lasting impact: do these books continue to enthrall readers and explore our human dilemmas and joys in memorable ways? And then by asking: did the books published in this year alter the course of literature? Did they influence literary form or content, or introduce key stylistic innovations?

Books that came out in 1862, for instance, included Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. But Gustave Flaubert’s novel of that year, Sallambo, set in Carthage during the 3rd Century BC, was no match for Madame Bovary. George Eliot’s historical novel Romola and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm were also disappointments.

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