Throughout this book, we see economic modelers distancing themselves from any explanatory power or realist intentions of their artifacts. Chapter 5 takes a closer look at such utterings as a specific kind of model talk that accompanied modeling as a practice. Frequently, such talk related to the power of mathematics as a language, centering on the greater “virility” of transparent and unambiguous mathematical methods compared to their verbal counterparts and predecessors. In contrast, I focus on instances in which economists grappled with their tricky artifacts and their messy practices. The talk surrounding Solow’s model turned it into a didactic device, a prototype for larger-scale planning models, an imagery of a world that macroeconomic management was capable of creating, and a part of a toolbox that equipped economists as “little thinkers” with technically sound and rationally appropriate knowledge. While model talk in the first place emphasized the epistemic and political tentativeness of models, Solow’s model turned into the epitome of what graduates called the “MIT style of modeling.”

This chapter focuses on Kerouac’s last major novel, Vanity of Duluoz in the context of the 1960s. This novel was composed under fraught conditions as Kerouac labored under intense financial pressure to earn money to pay for his mother’s debilitating illnesses. Not only was it a struggle for Kerouac to complete it, the novel also powerfully documents Kerouac’s struggle with reconciling his traditional, “conservative” upbringing with the nascent “Beat” rebellious energies – born in the forties and continuing into the sixties – a conflict which this chapter explores.

Kerouac’s On the Road had a profound impact on the 1960s’ counterculture. This chapter shows how the ethos of On the Road joined with the ethos of the rock movement that was ushered in shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 by the appearance of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. In addition, the psychedelic rock movement, also inspired by The Beatles, and led by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, pointed to Kerouac’s On the Road as a clarion call of the 1960s’ countercultural zeitgeist. With unprecedented influence over the youth culture of their times, such rock artists as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison of The Doors, among others pointed to On the Road as a seminal influence on their lives and art. Furthermore, the political wing of the counterculture, including Abbie Hoffman, also viewed On the Road as an inspiring text. This chapter explores the impact of On the Road on the counterculture, despite the novel’s often conservative message, and views it as a bookend to the 1960s’ counterculture.

The ten years that Robert Lowell lived in New York City – roughly, the 1960s – were among the happiest of his life as well as some of his most fertile artistically. The city promised a more energetic and engaged life than that he and Elizabeth Hardwick had had in Boston. Lowell’s celebrity was peaking, as he was courted by the most famous political and intellectual figures of the time. Later in the decade, the influence of lithium carbonate promised at last to alleviate the emotional torment that had plagued him and his loved ones. Finally, he began to discover a new kind of writing, one that announced a style and a subject matter beyond those of his “breakthrough” book Life Studies in 1959. But from the mid-1960s onward, Lowell’s view of New York City darkens. Many of his poems and letters indicate sadness and disappointment in New York’s and the nation’s situation.

Lowell’s intense creative engagement with Herman Melville was long-standing, evident from his first published poetry (notably and specifically in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket") to his last works, particularly his trilogy of verse dramas The Old Glory. Tracking Melville in Lowell is relatively straightforward in terms of allusion, but there are deeper and more significant traits that the two writers shared. Both are Miltonic in terms of their literary and intellectual heritage, both reflect on the legacy of New England; on guilt, violence, power and the imagining of the United States. The Old Glory includes Lowell’s dramatic verse refiguring of Benito Cereno where the 1855 novella is aligned with key public and political themes of the 1960s: racial inequality and unrest; the cold war; American nuclear capability. These have a disturbing and discomforting resonance in our own times, and usefully remind us of Lowell as a public and political poet.

The atmosphere of innovation and experimentation in the 1960s was not lost on Leonard Bernstein. His advocacy for the Mahler symphonies, for instance, was highly influential to a generation of composers excited by Mahler’s stylistic heterogeneity. Indeed, one of the best-known examples, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, was dedicated to Bernstein and a New York Philharmonic commission. Bernstein also collaborated with two other mavericks of that decade: the pianist Glenn Gould and the composer John Cage. With the former, Bernstein led a much-understood but controversial performance of the Brahms first piano concerto; with the latter, he created a programme with the Philharmonic about what he called aleatoric music, including a performance of Cage’s indeterminate work Atlas Eclipticalis. These encounters were of immense importance to all three artists.

Leonard Bernstein stated in 1977, ‘The work I have been writing all my life is about … the crisis of our century, a crisis of faith’. In the decade between 1961 and 1971, he completed just three works, all choral-orchestral: ‘Kaddish’ (Symphony No. 3), Chichester Psalms, and Mass. This chapter views these works through the lens of Bernstein’s intense concern with a crisis of faith, at once societal and personal, philosophical and musical. In its reading of the scores, it seeks a deeper understanding of the music (including for practical performance), and of Bernstein’s propositions in theological as well as musical terms – concluding that his process is not merely one of presenting crises, but also one working to revise and reinvigorate larger faith and musical structures, as we see most spectacularly in Mass’s ritual of crisis and reaffirmation.

This chapter will explore Zeffirelli’s film in the context of the 1960s by briefly looking back at his stage production and then forward to the film’s seminal influence on significant stage and film productions in the 1980s, 1990s and new millennium. These will include Ron Daniels’s spirited 1980 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film and Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford’s 2016 London staging with Richard Madden, Lily James and Derek Jacobi.

The Epilogue examines the failure of red secularism to reassert itself after 1945 due to the political climate in East and West Germany. It examines the further decline of Freethought as a consequence of lessening of confessional tensions in German society and the secularization and de-churching of German society in the 1960s.

This chapter argues for an integration of American theater produced across generic and institutional lines during the postwar decades into our understanding of theatrical modernism. It models thinking about theater across traditional divisions of textual drama from non-textual performance, Broadway from Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, and the avant-garde work of the 1960s from what preceded it. Theater in the midcentury was drawn toward both medial specificity and the strategic incorporation of other media, particularly film, and accordingly deployed two key formal strategies: improvisation and citation. Although important to theater in diverse ways before modernism, these became widespread, self-conscious tactics of postwar theater across generic lines, and expanded and developed over the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter closes with a reading of The Living Theatre’s 1959 production of The Connection as an exemplary case study.

In September 1968, regular British Vogue columnist Polly Devlin returned from a year working for the magazine’s sister publication in New York, and published a long article commenting on how, in her absence, the mood had changed.

In this chapter, life in UK psychiatric hospitals during the long 1960s is described. Based on oral testimony from a witness seminar, the chapter reveals perspectives which are not readily available in written sources. The authors outline how changes in treatments, the Mental Health Act 1959, multidisciplinary teams and ideals of community care provided opportunities to improve the lives of patients but that wide contrasts existed in the pace and extent of these changes and in clinical standards and practices between, and even within, hospitals. The chapter also addresses how some institutions were characterised by individual charismatic – and often ideologically dogmatic – leaders and the risks that this entailed. For many, their experiences had a lasting impact. Individual senior staff – ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – were role models who had profound effects on the course of junior clinicians’ future careers, while the memory of a tragedy, such as the suicide of a patient, could haunt involved staff members lifelong.

Chapter 9 probes the ‘women-in-music’ trope. Leah Branstetter deftly draws upon the work of Joanna Russ to examine how women have been marginalised within rock music. She considers the tendency of historiographies of rock to construct female rock musicians as anomalies, to devalue their contributions, and to resist categorising their music as ‘authentic’.