Uploaded January 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Timothy Scott Brown's new book Sixties Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines the border-crossing uprisings of the 1960s in Europe on both sides of the Cold War divide. Placing European developments within a global context formed by Third World liberation struggles and Cold War geopolitics, Brown highlights the importance of transnational exchanges across bloc boundaries. New Left ideas and cultural practices easily crossed bloc boundaries, but Brown demonstrates that the 1960s in Europe did not simply unfold according to a normative western model. Everywhere, innovations in the arts and popular culture synergized radical politics as advocates of workers' democracy emerged to pursue longstanding demands predating the Cold War divide. Tracing the development of a distinctive blend of cultural and political activism across diverse national settings, Sixties Europe examines an important, historically-recent attempt to address unresolved questions about human social organization that remain relevant in the present, and it offers an original history of Europe across a transformative decade.
Timothy Scott Brown is Professor of History at Northeastern University and Senior Fellow at the Institute for European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a 2016-17 Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and a 2016-17 ACLS Fellow. He is the author of West Germany in the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962-1978 (Cambridge, 2013; 2015), and Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (Berghahn, 2009; 2016). He is co-editor (with Andrew Lison) of The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (Palgrave, 2014), and (with Lorena Anton) of Between the Avantgarde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1957 to the Present (Berghahn, 2011).
Timothy Scott Brown's new book Sixties Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines the border-crossing uprisings of the 1960s in Europe on both sides of the Cold War divide. Placing European developments within a global context formed by Third World liberation struggles and Cold War geopolitics, Brown highlights the importance of transnational exchanges across bloc boundaries. New Left ideas and cultural practices easily crossed bloc boundaries, but Brown demonstrates that the 1960s in Europe did not simply unfold according to a normative western model. Everywhere, innovations in the arts and popular culture synergized radical politics as advocates of workers' democracy emerged to pursue longstanding demands predating the Cold War divide. Tracing the development of a distinctive blend of cultural and political activism across diverse national settings, Sixties Europe examines an important, historically-recent attempt to address unresolved questions about human social organization that remain relevant in the present, and it offers an original history of Europe across a transformative decade.
Timothy Scott Brown is Professor of History at Northeastern University and Senior Fellow at the Institute for European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a 2016-17 Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and a 2016-17 ACLS Fellow. He is the author of West Germany in the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962-1978 (Cambridge, 2013; 2015), and Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (Berghahn, 2009; 2016). He is co-editor (with Andrew Lison) of The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (Palgrave, 2014), and (with Lorena Anton) of Between the Avantgarde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1957 to the Present (Berghahn, 2011).
