Dangerous grounds: The American GI coffeehouse movement, 1967--1972
Item
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Title
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Dangerous grounds: The American GI coffeehouse movement, 1967--1972
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:a8df50cee5be:11614
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identifier
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12174
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Creator
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Parsons, David L.,
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Contributor
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Joshua Brown
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American history | Peace studies | Antiwar | Coffeehouses
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Abstract
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The 1960s witnessed an unprecedented level of antiwar organization in the United States, as a movement to end the war in Vietnam grew to include millions of Americans who participated in a wide range of protest activities. Beginning in 1967, antiwar activists opened GI coffeehouses in the cities and towns outside U.S. military bases, designed to serve as off-base refuges for the growing number of active-duty soldiers resisting the war. This dissertation examines three representative coffeehouses (the UFO coffeehouse in Columbia, South Carolina; the Oleo Strut coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas; and the Shelter Half coffeehouse in Tacoma, Washington) as nodal points of culture and politics that provide a fresh perspective on the complex relationship between the civilian antiwar movement and U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam era. The coffeehouse story reveals soldiers and activists working together, planning antiwar actions, printing underground newspapers and, more often than not, defending the coffeehouses themselves from unsympathetic citizens and concerned military authorities. Using radical publications, Congressional testimony, private letters, organizational records, military and government archives, and oral histories from key participants, this study analyzes a unique and thinly researched component of the antiwar movement and situates it within the larger history of late twentieth century American politics.;The GI coffeehouse movement constituted an important institutional component of the GI movement and the wider landscape of antiwar resistance and political activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As fundamentally cultural institutions with explicit political goals, GI coffeehouses bridged the often wide gap between the civilian antiwar movement and the American military, and in doing so ignited a significant amount of controversy that included many incidents of violent retaliation. The study concludes by examining the deep shifts in military policy that took place during the period immediately following the Vietnam War, contextualizing the impact of the era's social, political, and cultural turmoil on both the nation's military and the society it serves.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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History
