american culture

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out, or Just Browse the Sixties

Shortly after the demonstration, I got a call from Manny, my college roommate. He was now an army psychologist, working on secret LSD experiments with soldiers (recently it was revealed that these experiments were CIA-funded), and he wanted to know if I was interested in trying some. “Sure,” I replied. I had never even tried marijuana, but I heard talk about LSD at Maslow’s house. At Berkeley, I had lined up at the Langley Porter Clinic for two hours hoping to be a subject in an LSD experiment, but the quota was filled. They paid volunteers one hundred and fifty dollars to take it then!

The CIA Turned Me On to LSD, by Abbie Hoffman. In Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman, by Abbie Hoffman. (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 2000).

Find this book and other primary sources in the new FAU database, The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974.

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Twentieth Century Advice Literature: September Database of the Month

Twentieth Century Advice Literature: North American Guides on Race, Gender, Sex, and the Family is a new electronic resource that allows students and researchers to immerse themselves in the values and behaviors of Americans of the past. The collection provides a window into American social history by bringing together the instructional, prescriptive, behavioral, and etiquette literature that defined standards of personal conduct for millions of Americans and reflected the prevailing social mores across the twentieth century. The collection currently contains 19,367 pages of fully searchable handbooks, manuals, textbooks, etiquette guides, self-help books, instructional pamphlets, and how-to books that illustrate both how Americans actually behaved and how they felt they ought to behave. Read More >>

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