Hippies

The hippie 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 hippies did not pick that name for themselves: it was given to them by Michael Fallon, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, in a 1965 story about the new bohemian lifestyle that was developing in the city's Haight-Ashbury district (named for two streets that converge there also called the Haight). Fallon got the name by shortening Norman Mailer's term hipster, and he applied it to the second generation of beatniks who had moved into the Haight from nearby North Beach. This new generation of drop-outs was more optimistic than the beatniks, however, more prone to talk about love, more flamboyant. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and some used drugs such as cannabis, LSD, and magic mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness. In the summer of 1965 the hippies were few in number but were well on their way to creating a small, thriving society a counterculture. By June 1966 some fifteen thousand had moved into the Haight. That was the year that the largest generation of Americans ever the baby boomers reached ages eighteen through twenty. They were typically middle class, white citizens from predominantly white countries They initially promoted peace and 'love-making'. Believed in the idea of 'free love' which meant that anyone could have sex with anyone and they also encouraged orgy's.
 

In January 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco popularized hippie culture, leading to the legendary Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom, mobile "peace convoys" of New age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge. In Australia hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass. "Piedra Roja Festival", a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970.

Hippie fashions and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. A traditional Hippy image would consist of denim and tie-dye clothing, beaded tops and long hair which they explained as being 'Ethnic' and clearly defy what was conventional at the time. Artists that were commonly associated with Hippies were 'The Beatles' and 'Jimi Hendrix'. Hippies were always enthusiastic to questions society however not to the extreme attacks that the Punks later displayed. 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.

The climax of the hippie movement was the Summer of Love, also called the Gathering of Tribes for the Human Be-In, in 1967. Tens of thousands of mostly homeless young people came to the Haight over a period of a few months. The atmosphere actually was not very loving: the sidewalks were too crowded for anyone to get anywhere; the drug scene had become seedier and more dangerous; police were cracking down more aggressively on the neighborhood; and racial tensions, as was the case over the rest of the nation, threatened to explode into violence. Still, hippies were making a big impression on the popular imagination, thanks to hit songs such as the Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" and Scott Kendricks's "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" and movies such as The Love-ins. Even car commercials had worked groovy into their vocabulary. Realizing that their dream had gone sour, the citizens of the Haight held a Death of Hippie service in October of that year, marching down Haight Street at sunrise with a cardboard coffin. It was time to fan out from San Francisco, they felt, taking the pure hippie message to the rest of the country.

Hippies in the media-

These are two articles written in the 60's describing the actions of the hippies and teh events tehy went to. It also give us an insight of how the public and mainsteam society reacted to them and the way they behaved.