Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma, 1962�1972

Most scholarship about 1960s-era student activism and the counterculture focuses on the East and West Coasts, but Oklahoma's college campuses did see significant activism and "dropping out." In Prairie Power, Sarah Eppler Janda shows that participants in both student activism and retreat from conformist society sought connections to Oklahoma's past while forging new paths for themselves. Many movement organizers in Oklahoma, especially those in the University of Oklahoma's chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and the anti-war movement, fit into a larger midwestern and southwestern activist mentality of "prairie power": a blend of free-speech advocacy, countercultural expression, and anarchist tendencies that set them apart from most East Coast student activists. Janda also reveals the vehemence with which state officials sought to repress campus "agitators," and discusses Oklahomans who chose to retreat from the mainstream rather than fight to change it. Prairie Power will appeal to those interested in the history of Oklahoma, the counterculture, and political dissent in the 1960s.

• | Author: Sarah Eppler Janda
• | Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• | Publication Date: January 25, 2018
• | Number of Pages: 232 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0806157941
• | ISBN-13: 9780806157948