AN AUGURY OF REVOLUTION: THE IRANIAN STUDENT ...

decade. Inequality, imperialism, contrasting political ideologies, and the overbearing power of
the state led members of all of these movements to push for a drastic change.
Because of the magnitude of unrest in the 1960s, historians have given much attention to
the subject, particularly the American and European student movements of the decade. Michael
Seidman has produced one of the most extensively researched books on Parisian students and
workers and he emphasizes the political failures of the movement. 68 Sabine Von Dirke
examined the West German counterculture from the 1950s through the 1980s, and gives special
attention to the student movement of the 1960s and its use of ideas from the Frankfurt School. 69
Clayborne Carson gave a scholarly treatment to SNCC by tracing the evolution of the group’s
ideologies and methods from the pacifist phase at the beginning of the decade to the more radical
era of the late 1960s. 70
W.J. Roroabaugh authored a study on Berkeley, which was the center of
much student radicalism, including the Iranian student movement. 71
One of the more recent
works on SDS was authored by David Barber and he demonstrates how the limits of
radicalization when dealing with gender and race splintered the group. 72 Vladislav Zubok has
authored a recent work that analyzes the “Thaw Generation” in the Soviet Union. Zubok argues
that this generation was influenced by Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism in 1956,
leading them to resemble the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century that was eliminated
by Stalin’s purges 73
68 Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2004).
69 Sabine Von Dirke, “All Power to the Imagination!” Art and Politics in the West German Counterculture from the
Student Movement to the Greens (University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
70 Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Harvard University Press, 1995).
71 W.J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (Oxford University Press, 1990); Also see Robert Cohen and
Reginald E. Zelnik, eds., The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (University of California
Press, 2002).
72 David Barber, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why it Failed (University Press of Mississippi, 2008).
73 Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press,
2009).
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