What I mean by this is the more accurate the representation of history the more likely it is like actually traveling there and experiencing it first hand.
I experience this the most clearly in relation to being 12 in 1960 and 21 in 1969. Most people these days were not born until around 1969 or after. For example, if you were born in 1969 you are now plus or minus 47 years of age. Most people alive on the planet are under this age. So, often when people try to talk to me about what it was like in the 1960s they get completely polarized views which also are very cliche.
However, the reality was much more confusing for everyone. The paradoxes of the 1960s are illustrated by movies like "Easy Rider" where all the progressive crazy breakthrough people basically were killed by traditional people. This happened a lot because people were so entrenched in traditional thought then throughout the U.S.
And this traditional thought hadn't changed that much since the Civil War.
For example, as horrific as it is today there were Football players in my high school who went out Friday and Saturday nights with baseball bats looking for male young black men and Gay men throughout Los Angeles. This was even more prevalent in the Southern States then than in Los Angeles.
For me the two scariest memories of the 1960s were one in 1964 during the Watts Riots and the other after a Love IN in Griffith Park in 1969.
The first one is I was watching in the distance all the smoke come up from blacks burning the city of Watts in that riot 10 or more miles away from where I lived but that wasn't the scariest. The scariest was white people in the hills around Glendale firing their rifles in target practice to shoot any black people who came to Glendale. (This actually happened and I witnessed it!) Black people then would know not to leave the areas they lived in because White people would have shot them then. So, to me, this was the most terrifying aspect of all this.
Griffith Park is a hill side park topped by the Griffith Observatory you see in many movies like "Terminator" near the beginning where "Arnold" steals a man's clothes. IT is to Los Angeles what Central Park is to New York.
The next most terrifying thing I witnessed in a social setting was a Griffith Park in Los Angeles. I was at a Love IN and many people there were smoking marijuana. It was a free concert put on by people like Buffy Saint Marie and the "Flying Burrito Brothers" who when they were called a different name did "When you come home to San Francisco better wear some flowers in your hair".
Many people there weren't just smoking pot they were on heavier things like LSD as well. So, they were pretty out of it. About halfway through the concert the police (50 to 100 police) holding billy clubs like they were going to use them on us, smacked their billy clubs against their left palms in a threat to all of us there. They had encircled the several thousand or more people there in Griffith Park. I realized people were going to get beat up by those billy clubs and some would be arrested because of being there at the Love IN. So, it was quite possible then to be "Killed by a billy club" by the police just for being there with music groups that tended to be "Anti-Viet Nam war Groups" of those times, even though I would say about 1/4 of the people attending there were likely young Army Soldiers on leave from the Viet Nam War. That was pretty obvious by their either very short cropped hair or wigs they wore to try to fit in with all the "Long Hairs" of 1969. Everyone there young was accepted. There was no war or problem between soldiers and hippies or regular people there. My hair wasn't very long then though but likely I was just beginning to grow a mustache at that time. I was there for the music and to be with friends there and not there to get "High" and listen to the music. But, I and my friends got ready to run when the last music chord was played. As we ran as fast as we could through the labyrinth of police with billy clubs hitting people we knew the most stoned of those in the audience there might not survive the day.
We were quick and they didn't bother us. The police wanted to beat up or kill the most stoned dirty hippies there. We were not that so we were left alone by the police who went after super long hairs who dressed the weirdest and were the most stoned. This was likely the scariest thing I had to deal with in a social setting throughout the 1960s. There were more times when I was personally scared and didn't think I would survive, but those times it was because I was rock climbing and a piton failed in a rock crack or because my motorcycle almost hit a 6 foot cliff because of a recent rain on a road and I had to lay my bike down and dig in the left foot peg to stop before I went over a small cliff at 45 mph and died.
So, actually the 1960s were thousands of crazy things that happened, but mostly what people study today are mostly cliches and not what people actually experienced then. So, the more accurate your study of history actually is the more likely it is like traveling time in actuality.
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