Hippie

Clockwise from top:
Young people near the Woodstock music festival in August 1969; Button pins from the sexual revolution; Jefferson Airplane on the cover of Cash Box in 1967; An anti-war demonstrator offers a flower to a Military Police officer during the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam's 1967 March on the Pentagon.

A hippie, also spelled hippy,[1] especially in British English,[2] is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during or around 1964 and spread to different countries around the world.[3] The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks[4] who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.[5][6]

The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date".[7][8][9] The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies adopted the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and many used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore altered states of consciousness.[10][11]

In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and the Monterey International Pop Festival[12] popularized hippie culture, leading to the 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 in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic third Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people.[13] In later years, mobile "peace convoys" of New Age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere. 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.[14] Hippie and psychedelic culture influenced 1960s and early 1970s youth culture in Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe (see Mánička).[15]

Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, mainstream society has assimilated many aspects of hippie culture. The religious and cultural diversity the hippies espoused has gained widespread acceptance, and their pop versions of Eastern philosophy and Asiatic spiritual concepts have reached a larger group.

The vast majority of people who had participated in the golden age of the hippie movement were those born soon after the end of WW2, during the late 1940s and early 1950s. These include the youngest of the Silent Generation and oldest of the Baby Boomers; the former who were the actual leaders of the movement as well as the early pioneers of rock music.[16]

  1. ^ Hippie Cambridge Dictionary
  2. ^ "hippy - Definition of hippy in English by Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford Dictionaries - English. Archived from the original on December 31, 2017.
  3. ^ "hippie | History, Lifestyle, & Beliefs". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2019-05-24.
  4. ^ "Beat movement - History, Characteristics, Writers, & Facts". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2 March 2019.
  5. ^ Howard Smead (November 1, 2000). Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty: The First Four Decades of the Baby Boom. iUniverse. pp. 155–. ISBN 978-0-595-12393-3.
  6. ^ Kilgallen, Dorothy (June 11, 1963). "Dorothy Kilgallen's Voice of Broadway". Syndicated column via The Montreal Gazette. Retrieved July 10, 2014. New York hippies have a new kick – baking marijuana in cookies...
  7. ^ To say "I'm hip to the situation" means "I'm aware of the situation. See: Sheidlower, Jesse (December 8, 2004), "Crying Wolof: Does the word hip really hail from a West African language?", Slate Magazine, retrieved May 7, 2007
  8. ^ "Online Etymology Dictionary". Etymonline.com. Retrieved February 3, 2014.
  9. ^ "Hep - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary". Merriam-webster.com. August 31, 2012. Retrieved February 3, 2014.
  10. ^ Davis, Fred; Munoz, Laura (June 1968). "Heads and Freaks: Patterns and Meanings of Drug Use Among Hippies". Journal of Health and Social Behavior. 9 (2): 156–64. doi:10.2307/2948334. JSTOR 2948334. PMID 5745772. S2CID 27921802.
  11. ^ Allen, James R.; West, Louis Jolyon (1968). "Flight from violence: Hippies and the green rebellion". American Journal of Psychiatry. 125 (3): 364–370. doi:10.1176/ajp.125.3.364. PMID 5667202.
  12. ^ Festival, Monterey International Pop. "Monterey International Pop Festival". Monterey International Pop Festival. Archived from the original on 22 June 2017. Retrieved 2 March 2019.
  13. ^ "The attendance at the third Pop Festival at...Isle of Wight, England on 30 Aug 1970 was claimed by its promoters, Fiery Creations, to be 400,000." The Guinness book of Records, 1987 (p. 91), Russell, Alan (ed.). Guinness World Records, 1986 ISBN 0851124399.
  14. ^ Purcell, Fernando; Alfredo Riquelme (2009). Ampliando miradas: Chile y su historia en un tiempo global. RIL Editores. p. 21. ISBN 978-956-284-701-8.
  15. ^ "(Un)Civil Societies: September 3, 2007". Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 11 November 2008.
  16. ^ "The Misconception About Baby Boomers and the Sixties". The New Yorker. 18 August 2019. Retrieved 20 December 2021.