Lecturing About the 1960s

I find it hard to lecture about the 1960s - the movements, the activism, the counterculture. I can do a mean lecture on the Great Society or Vietnam - but there is something about the sixties culture and society that I have a hard time getting a handle on.

I want to show the 1960s as different from, yet a reaction to the culture and values of the 1950s. I also want to demonstrate that not everyone embraced the more radical elements of 1960s and in some ways the election of 1968 was backlash against some of the cultural and social aspects of the period. However, I have a hard time doing these things without making the activists of period seem like caricaturews or exaggerations of real people. At the same time, let's face it the Yippies really were kinda strange.

I'll just muddle through it for tomorrow. Maybe when I revise in a couple of years, I'll have a better idea of how to handle it.