During the “long sixties,” baby boomers raised on democratic postwar ideals demanded a more egalitarian society for all. While a few became vocal leaders at universities across Canada, nearly 90% of Canada’s young people went straight to work after high school. There, they brought the anti-authoritarian spirit of the youth revolt to the labour movement. While university-based activists combined youth culture with a new brand of radicalism to form the New Left, young workers were defying their aging union leaders in a wave of renewed militancy. In Rebel Youth, Ian Milligan looks at these converging currents, demonstrating convincingly how they were part of the same youth phenomenon.
Ian Milligan is an assistant professor of Canadian and digital history at the University of Waterloo.
...Milligan’s study is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the long sixties, which highlights the diversity and complexity of the era that has heretofore escaped popular memories of it.
A highly readable and important work that brings young Canadians who were in the workforce – rather than attending university – into the conversation about what the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s were all about.