DICTIONARY: A-D

A

“All-over” approach - the whole canvas deserves to be treated with equal importance and value

Apollo 11 Mission - space exploration which put an astronaut on the moon for the first time

B

Bay of Pigs operation -  the invansion on Cuba in hopes of overthrowing the lefist Castro's regime and communism

Beat - in the expression Beat Poets, this term suggests musical downbeats (as in jazz), angelical beatitude or blessedness, and "beat up" - tired or hurt

Beatniks - a United States youth subculture of the 1950s; rejected possessions or regular work or traditional dress; for communal living and psychedelic drugs and anarchism; favored modern forms of jazz (e.g., bebop)

Betty Friedan - an American feminist, social activist and writer, who founded a National Organization for Women

Billboard - a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, which maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis

British invasion - an influx of rock and roll performers from Great Britain who became popular in the United States, Australia and elsewhere in 1964

C

Chicago Seven - defendants charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot, and other charges related to violent protests that took place in Chicago, Illinois on the occasion of the 1968 Democratic National Convention

Civil Right Act (1964) - created the equal opportunities for all in order to prevent job discrimination due to religion, national origin, race or sex

Confessional poet - a poet that traffics in intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about him or herself, in poems about illness, sexuality, despondence and the like. The Confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s, for example: John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

Counterculture - in sociology, a term used to describe a cultural group whose values and norms are at odds with those of the social mainstream

Cuban missile crisis -  started with the Soviet Union installing offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba and ended in making Kennedy the acknowledged leader of the democratic West

D

Diggers - a radical community-action and guerilla-theater group from 1966-68, based in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco