For most Americans today, 1968 is about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Depending on your views of such things, it was either a triumph of liberation or a period of moral decay.

When thinking more politically, most liberal commentators regard 1968 as a brief interlude on the road to the “end of history.” Paul Berman sees the “radical exhilaration” of the year as the first phase in a process of maturation, an “awkward modulation,” that in 1989 would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of liberal democracy.

At Jacobin, we remember the student and worker revolts of 1968 as part of a radical movement for democracy. In the United States, they were shaped by the decline of postwar anticommunist repression, by the war in Vietnam, and by the civil rights struggle against Jim Crow segregation.