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The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World

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Music: Classic Pop & Rock

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Two-part series about the countercultural explosion that was the Summer of Love in 1967.

The untold story of how a German cult, pioneering psychologists and secret LSD experiments sparked a gathering of hippie tribes in 1967 San Francisco that would change the world.

Mike Connolly

Emma Cahusac

Simon Chu

Erica Starling Productions

The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World: Series 1: Episode 1

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Episode 1

Series 1

BBC Four - The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World, Series 1, Episode 1

How ideas, music and lifestyles from Asia and Europe became entwined in California.

Series about the countercultural explosion that was 1967's Summer of Love. How ideas, music and lifestyles from Asia, Europe and the American left became entwined in California.

The first episode looks at how ideas, music and lifestyles from Asia, Europe and the American left became entwined in California. It traces the roots of the hippies back to a 19th-century German sect of wandering naturalists called Lebensreform, who brought their freethinking ideas about nature to California after the Second World War. There, they merged with a growing interest in eastern mystical concepts of human nature imported to America by maverick British thinkers like Aleister Crowley and Aldous Huxley. Add to this mix a wonder drug called LSD, first developed by the CIA, and a wave of student activists and anti-war protesters agitating for revolution, and you have the astonishing story of how these forces came together to give birth to the Summer of Love in San Francisco, 1967.

The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World: Series 1

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