Much of the research paying homage to the rebelliousness of 1968 still narrows its focus on national political history and perspectives. Existing scholarship has frequently contributed to the reinterpretation of historical events into foundational narratives, proclaiming the more or less pronounced “refoundation” of liberal societies during the years of the long 1960s in the West and another round of orthodoxy in the East.
In contrast to this approach, Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder, and Joachim Scharloth have compiled a thought-provoking collection of chapters that identify the connections between current historical research on postwar European protest movements and the “transnational turn” in the social sciences. Moreover, by broadening the prevailing chronological and geographical scope of research, the miscellany contributes to the reevaluation of traditional dichotomies of success and failure regarding the legacies of the period from 1956 to the mid-1970s. The different academic backgrounds of the contributors, coming from the fields of...