1968 STUDENT GENER/REVO

by Ronald Fraser, Luisa Passerini, Daniel Bertaux

This examination of an important year in Western history is published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of 1968. 1968, like 1948, was a year in which the Western world seemed to hover on the brink of revolution, and much of the impetus for change came from the student movement. In Paris, rioting students threatened to bring down the authoritarian government of General de Gaulle; in London the anti-Vietnamese War rally was followed by the occupation of the LSE; in Germany and Italy universities were occupied and massive demonstrations mounted; in the United States anti-war fervour and a decade of civil rights culminated in the bloody scenes at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. Hostility to the materialism of the postwar consensus made household names of Rudi Dutschke, Danny Cohn Bendit, Tariq Ali and Bernadette Devlin. Public attention was drawn to feminism, the pop and alternative cultures and the sexual revolution. The author is a leading oral historian, and has worked as a journalist with "History Workshop" since 1980. He has written three oral histories of Spain, his most recent book being "In Search of a Past" (1984).

Genres: History

408 pages, Hardcover

First published April 12, 1988

About the author

Ronald Angus Fraser (9 December 1930 – 10 February 2012) was a British historian noted for his oral histories and in particular for Blood Of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War, his oral history of the Spanish Civil War.

Born in Hamburg to an upper-middle class British father and wealthy American mother, Fraser was educated at boarding school in England and the USA and undertook further studies in Switzerland and France. He chronicled his upbringing in his oral history In Search of a Past (1984), in which interviews with the servants at his family's Berkshire country house served as a counterpoint to his own memories. Fraser spent five years as a correspondent with Reuters in Brussels, The Hague and London before moving to Spain in 1957 to become a full-time writer.

Fraser was one of the pioneers of oral history in the 1960s and '70s, most notably with In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes: The Life of Manuel Cortes (1972) and Blood Of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (1979). His book Napoleon's Cursed War: Popular Resistance in the Spanish Peninsular War, 1808-1814 (2008) applied his experience of oral history to traditional archival sources.

Fraser's friendship with André Gorz led to his involvement with the New Left Review from the early 1960s. He was a lifelong socialist and at his death a senior member of the New Left Trust. He was a founder of New Left Books, the parent company of publisher Verso Books.

Reviews

[Outlawish]

Çevirisi berbat ve kitap yayınlanmadan önce muhtemelen hiç editör görmemiş. Verdiğim paraya değil ama okumaya çalışırken kaybettiğim zamana yanıyorum. Belge Yayınlarından çıkan kitabı bir kenara bırakıp bir de İngilizcesini satın alıp okumak zorunda kaldım.

[Craig Werner]

A very useful oral history incorporating the voices of student activists from West Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland and the U.S. If I read the introduction right, the American material was added for a US edition; it's interesting enough, but there's nothing there that won't be familiar to anyone who's done more than dip their toe into the Sixties waters. The European material, on the other hand, is illuminating, providing clear notions of the rise and fall of the "revolutionary" energies that culminated in Paris during 1968.