Eras of Turmoil: 1960s and New

In the early 1960s, Cold War assumptions – faith in American leadership, acceptance of militarized containment, and deference to national security expertise – shaped political culture in the United States and much of the Western world. By decade’s end, however, that consensus had become fragmented. This lecture examines how the upheavals of the 1960s transformed public attitudes toward the Cold War, moving them from broad acceptance to skepticism, dissent, and, in some cases, outright defiance. Focusing primarily on the United States, the lecture traces how the Civil Rights Movement exposed contradictions between Cold War rhetoric and domestic realities; how nuclear anxieties fueled the Ban-the-Bomb movement; and how the escalating war in Vietnam radicalized students, intellectuals, and veterans alike. Popular culture played a central role in this unraveling, as films such as Dr. Strangelove, The Bedford Incident, and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming satirized or questioned the logic of Cold War brinkmanship. The lecture also situates the American experience within a wider global context, exploring parallel developments abroad—from the revolutionary fervor of 1968 to the Prague Spring and other challenges to Cold War orthodoxies. Together, these movements reshaped political discourse and redefined the boundaries of dissent during a pivotal decade.

In Canada’s centennial year, after paying a visit to Expo ’67, French President Charles de Gaulle delivered a stirring speech to a huge crowd in front of Montreal’s city hall. He concluded with the words “Vive le Québec libre!”, the slogan that Quebec separatists had been chanting earlier that day. Loosely translated, it means “Long live a free Quebec!”

By the late-1960s, various groups supporting Quebec nationalism, sovereigntism, and separatism – which are not the same thing – were on the rise. They ranged from those who wanted more power for the province of Quebec within Canada, to people who wanted an independent Quebec so it could return to its conservative, Catholic roots, to radical separatists, inspired by Marxism and global decolonization movements, some of whom were prepared to use violence to achieve their objectives.

This lecture will untangle the different forms of nationalism, sovereigntism, and separatism that were coursing through Quebec politics, social movements, and society in the 1960s, and consider their various manifestations, including the newly formed Parti Québécois (PQ), and the radical Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ).  We will consider the impacts of this social movement both within Quebec, but also its ramifications for the rest of Canada, including how the major federal parties responded to this challenge to their country. We will also examine the long-term impacts of the separatist movement and Quebec nationalism, and how they are still highly relevant in Quebec politics today.

In this lecture, historian Christopher Stuart Taylor begins from a simple observation: many of us in the room have lived through extraordinary social change. We remember the 1960s not as history, but as lived experience. We remember the news images, the protests, the speeches, and the sense that the world was shifting in important and sometimes unsettling ways.

Drawing on his work as a historian of Black Canadian and Afro‑diasporic life, Taylor invites audiences to revisit that period and consider what it set in motion. Rather than treating the 1960s as a moment that resolved the question of racial equality, this talk explores what has changed since then and what has remained stubbornly familiar. Taylor reflects on how ideas about citizenship, fairness, and belonging that emerged during the Civil Rights era continue to shape public conversations today, often in new language and unfamiliar forms.

Along the way, he shares stories from his own research and life as a scholar, showing how history is not just something we study, but something we carry with us. This lecture is less about assigning blame and more about understanding continuity, responsibility, and learning across generations. It offers an opportunity to step back, reflect together, and consider how the past helps us make sense of the present we are all navigating.

The 1960s was a decade of upheaval, bringing with it robust anti-colonial discussions throughout the world. From the defiant grassroots activism of the American Indian Movement (AIM) to the rejection of the Trudeau government’s 1969 White Paper in Canada, Indigenous peoples persisted in asserting their rights to territory. At the same time, the Sixties Scoop challenged Indigenous family and community cohesion and educational gaps persisted, as did industrial and extractive threats to land. We will examine these historical tensions and their enduring legacies, asking how the spirit of Indigenous resurgence continues to define the protection of Indigenous homelands and the ongoing work of reconciliation.

When the modern environmental movement burst onto the world stage in the 1960s and 70s, sweeping legislation and landmark international agreements reshaped how governments thought about nature. Canada, for reasons worth examining, lagged behind. This talk traces that history honestly, from the wave of environmental consciousness that produced the American Endangered Species Act, the Ramsar Convention, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, to Canada’s slower and sometimes halting response.

Out of that urgent global moment, a new scientific discipline was born. Conservation biology emerged in the 1980s and 90s as a mission-driven field dedicated to understanding and protecting the diversity of life on Earth. It was bold, interdisciplinary, and explicitly values-driven in ways that science rarely had been before.

But science, like any human institution, has had to reckon with who it has historically excluded. The final and perhaps most consequential chapter of this story belongs to the present. Drawing on a landmark set of calls to action directed at natural scientists working in Canada, and a recent reflection on their progress five years on, this talk asks what it means to do conservation biology in genuine partnership with Indigenous peoples, and why that shift may be the most important development of all.

From feminist liberation groups to reproductive and civil rights movements, plus peace, labour, and environmental activism, Canadian women were busy in the 1960s and into the 1970s fighting for equality and improving people’s lives locally and internationally. This talk will exam the unique nature of women’s mobilization in era called “second wave feminism” while finding continuity in women’s political and social action in earlier periods and contemporary times.

This lecture will examine why the US intervened in Vietnam for over 30 years, consequences of this decision and the affects the Vietnamese experience still has on contemporary America. The decision to commit US power and expertise to Vietnam was based on the best intentions yet had little understanding of Vietnam and the nature of the civil war. Vietnam intervention was poorly presented to the American people, US actions were subject to US pollical fights while their South Vietnamese allies were ignored, patronized and abandoned. The war provoked mass protest and politicized a generation. In the academy, the media and the US culture wars it is still being fought while the lessons learned and not learned still haunt US foreign policy.

When the Beatles released Revolver in August 1966 it marked a coming of age for rock ‘n’ roll. The album introduced psychedelic music into the mainstream with “Tomorrow Never Knows” and started popular music on a musical and cultural road trip that would eventually lead to the culmination of the counterculture, Woodstock. In this lecture I will look at the characteristics and cultural politics of psychedelic rock in the music of artists such as the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Janis Joplin.