2. Outlawing of racial discriminations
Martin Luther King ( , April 4th): an American minister, civil rights activist, advocating nonviolent civil disobedience.
Shot in Memphis in April, 1968.
Speech “I have a dream” in 1963 after a march in Washington, DC.
Fight for obtaining the right to vote for coloured people and end racial segregation and discrimination.
1964: Civil Rights Act : Voting Rights Act

3. Sexual Revolution and women’s rights
A shift in traditional values (sex became accepted outside the boundaries of heterosexual marriage)
Birth Control Pill: first approved for contraceptive use in the USA in 1960
A book: Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
Improvement in gay’s rights (before 1970s: being homosexual was considered as a mental illness)
Decade regarded as a decade of sexual freedom.

4. Music
Before 1963: music // style and beliefs of the previous period (Elvis Presley for instance)
After 1963: change in popular music. Wider range of genres:
➥surf rock/psychedelic rock (The Doors/ the Beatles)
➥rock: The Who, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin
➥protest music/folk rock: Bob Dylan, The Mamas and the Papas
British invasion: The Beatles /the Rolling Stones
Huge music festivals: Woodstock (Summer of Love 1969), Janis Joplin.

5. Fashion
A lot of different styles, influenced by music and revealing your political opinions...

6. The Hippies
Long hair (to assert their freedom) Colorful clothing + ragged jeans + military clothes + Native
American accessories
Representatives of the anti-war movement
Often using drugs (LSD and marijuana), all that to express their will of freedom

7. The Mods (London style)
Clothes with geometrical forms
Tailor-suit for men
Listening to Jazz music, soul
Later spread to some rock bands
Influenced the whole world after the success of the Beatles

8. The Mini-Skirt, Mary Quant and Twiggy
In 1961, fashion designer Mary Quant designed the mini-skirt: it was first regarded as shocking, and then became the most worn piece of clothing for women in the late 1960s, thanks to the worldwide famous model Twiggy.

9. A lot of political changes occurred in this era…
Politics
A lot of political changes occurred in this era…
➥ Cold War: from 1945 to A state of really high tension between the USA and the USSR resulting in a lot of suspicions and a series of international incidents that brought the world to the brink of disaster
During the Sixties: Cuban missile crisis / building of the Berlin wall

10. Politics
➥ Vietnam war: Proxy war between the USA and the USSR, lasted from 1954 to (3 million people died)
This war was the first to be widely covered by journalists ⇒ a wave of anti-war protest in the USA. Some people refused to fight this war.
It brought a lot of divisions within the American population.
During the sixties: escalation of the war (1969:peak of US involvement in the war, 500,000 soldiers there)

11. Politics Other noteworthy events:
➥assassination of J.F. Kennedy, the American president, in 1962.

12. Space exploration
As part of the Cold War, the Space Race between the USA and the USSR propelled (propel = entraîner, propulser) much progress in this field.
➥ 1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: 1st person in space
➥ 1969: American Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to walk on the moon

13. Other prominent events/facts of the Sixties...
➥ 1967: colour television was first broadcast
➥The Sixties: first true decade of consumerism
➥First pirate radios in the UK
➥ Birth of Greenpeace and anti-nuclear protest
➥ The Sixties in the UK were called “The Swinging Sixties”
➥ The bases of nowadays society were established during this decade.