History of Hippies

The Hippie subculture is one that is now filled with false information and stereotype. We would like to explore what a 'Hippie' really was, comparing that to how it has been translated today, and finding out how it got to that point; what happened inbetween? 

The movement began in the 1960's at San Francisco,in the corner of Haight street and Ashbury street (now known as Haight Ashbury District). Hippie subculture had many symbols (such as Flower Power or the Peace and love) for the meanings of freedom, love, peace and unity.

It was based about trying to make the world a better environment where violence would be non-existent, and the concepts of lifestyle amazed the whole world.

The Hippies were fighting for civil rights such as racism, poverty, and wanted the war in Vietnam to end. Young activists protested and organised huge anti-war demonstrations at any public places and university/college campuses.

A minority of people aren't informed nowadays that Hippie counter-culture  was inspired first from the 50's movement called Beat Generation. The word 'Hippie' first started from the sentence "I'm Hip", often used by the Beatniks, some of them were called "Hipsters". This is how the Hippies started by then.  The Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg was one of the greatest examples in this subculture. He was probably the father of Beat generation and he then became a fixture of the Hippie culture. Jack Kerouac was a big inspiration figure too and he was known for his famous book 'On the road'.

 

Most of the Beat figures were sliding into the Hippie psychedelic generation, and Kerouac found the concept of Hippies totally ridiculous.

In August 1969, Woodstock was the festival that stayed forever in memory of the Hippy movement; about half a million hippies joined at Woodstock for 3 days altogether in peace and harmony.