Were the 1960s incredible? (photos)

"The times they are a changin'," icon Bob "Deal with the Devil" Dylan sang (Elaine Mayes/Getty)

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Berkeley in the Sixties (film)

Jethro Tull has that song, "Living in the Past." We have to wonder if we're sad, pining for what was or, worse, what might have been, or worrying by always forecasting the future. Almost certainly, we're stuck in the past, thinking about all the good parts of the Sixties in Berkeley. But that means forgetting almost all of the bad. We have made progress as a country, in as much as things have not changed for the better nearly enough for our liking. Still, it's fun to reminisce and imagine how it must have been when we know it wasn't. The Sixties have good PR and drive us to arise and make things even better for the whole world.

We can learn from the CIA and Americans (DL)

The decade of the 1960s was one of the most tumultuous decades in American history. It was marked by peaceful political radicalism, violent American imperialism abroad and conservative clampdowns at home, unpopular overseas wars, popular anti-war and civil rights movements, and the terrifying threat of nuclear Armageddon in a phony "Cold War" used by cynical Russian and American leaders to control their gullible populations.

But there were breakthroughs too thanks to those citizen struggles: in civil rights, free love, reproductive rights, reverse engineering of ET technology from UFOs that came into the possession of various governments (with the US distributing the advanced technology to private industry to enrich them as it was given to the world population with the sudden appearance of transistors, chips, computers, Velcro, and more in a single century than thousands of years leading up to it, with the rate of advances still growing exponentially), and space travel.

Click through this gallery to see incredible images that capture the drama and upheaval of 1960s America... PHOTO GALLERY (Love Exploring via MSN)