Rorabaugh, W.J. Berkeley at War: The 1960s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Summary
Too much attention by scholars, Rorabaugh contends, have focused on the national crises, rather than delve closely into the local level and understand the experiences from “the bottom up.” In ''Berkeley at War, ''Rorabaugh uses Berkeley as a case study of the 1960s and argues that the social turmoil that came to define the decade was “really a battle over power.” He writes: “College students, young blacks, members of the New Left, and hippies believed that power should flow from the bottom up rather than from the top down.” (x) The sixties, according to Rorabuagh, was thus a decade of testing, when social, political and economic assumptions came under attack and forced institutions to respond. The FSM movement, drawing on civil rights tactics, “established that activist students could, under certain conditions, win victories against larger powerful bureaucracies.” (170). The liberals failed “to recognize that the radicals could negotiate, as they lacked institutionalized forms of power. Ironically, Rorabaugh notes, Conservatives and radicals shared similar contempt of the liberal university and policy. “At the heart of the contempt for liberalism on the part of both the New Right and the New Left,” Rorarbaugh writes, “was a seldom acknowledged but growing libertarianism.” (170) The book is broken into four chapters: “White” about the white student movement at UC Berkeley; “Black” about the black movement within the city; “Red” about the New and Old Left, in particular the anti-war movement; and “Green” about Hippies in the Berkeley area.