The NYT reviews Fred Kaplan's new book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed, in which he argues that the transformations of the late 1960s built on groundwork laid a decade before by innovators like Gregory Pincus and Barney Rosset.
I would add Thomas Kuhn to the mix though I am not sure Kaplan does. Though Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was required reading for the 60s counterculture, it appeared much earlier, in 1962. Interestingly, Kaplan's take on the Sixties situates him as a long-view historian, someone for whom the idea of a cultural revolution, or Kuhn's idea of it anyway, would be a hard sell.
