The Prison Was the American Dream: Youth Revolt and the Origins of the Counterculture. (August 2008) Damon Randolph Bach, B.A., The University of Wisconsin at Madison Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Terry H. Anderson This thesis discusses the reasons for the emergence of the American counterculture in the mid-1960s, and makes a significant contribution to the existing literature on the subject with an innovative methodology. Historians have neglected to study the counterculture’s grievances, the issues, and events that birthed it, employing a systematic year-by-year analysis. And few have used the sources most appropriate for drawing conclusions: the underground press, a medium hippies used to communicate with other like-minded individuals. This thesis does both. The most imperative factors that led to the emergence of the counterculture can be firmly placed in the first years of the 1960s. Students and dropouts feared the prospect of worldwide nuclear annihilation, and railed against the Cold War and the Cold War consensus that left little in the way of political alternatives. Old Guard liberals became targets, for they seemed to be complacent with America’s foreign policy, which prolonged and entrenched the Cold War world. American society and the Establishment frustrated and angered the young. It posed a danger to civil liberties and equality for minorities, while restricting freedom. Most grievously, American universities and those who ran them sought to assimilate youths into the military-

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