Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell

On Aug. 17, 1969, the Woodstock Music Festival ended.

The New York Times article about Woodstock reported, “Waves of weary youngsters streamed away from the Woodstock Music and Art Fair last night and early today as security officials reported at least two deaths and 4,000 people treated for injuries, illness and adverse drug reactions over the festival’s three-day period.” It also noted there were two births and two deaths.

The article discussed how townspeople and nearby businesses helped overcome shortages of food, water and medical facilities, and how a series of downpours turned large swaths of the area into mud.

The organizers had planned for a crowd of no more than 150,000; nearly 500,000 would eventually show up.

Featuring a lineup of some of the era’s most popular folk and rock groups, the event kicked off early in the evening on Aug. 15 with a performance by Ritchie Havens, continuing long into the night with a finale by Joan Baez.

Even as the concert began, thousands more than expected made their way toward the farm, with and without tickets, clogging motorways throughout the state. Overwhelmed by the crowds, organizers eventually gave up on collecting tickets after fences were cut away and trampled, encouraging even more to make the journey.

With music starting each day around noon, the event hosted legendary performances by Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin, The Who, Credence Clearwater Revival and, most notably, Jimi Hendrix.

The event soon became as much about the crowd as the performers themselves, as a peaceful gathering of drug-addled music lovers, hippies and activists, gathered together in the final days of the decade that had defined them.

After the show came to an end with a closing performance by Hendrix, Woodstock would live on thanks to the camera crew who gathered enough footage to create an Oscar-nominated documentary and soundtrack of the event.

Connect to Today:

An August 2009 article on findingDulcinea reassessed Woodstock on its 40th anniversary, focusing on the fact that it came a year after the brutal spring and summer of 1968, and while an unpopular war in Vietnam raged. It quoted a New York Times article in which Jon Pareles describes both the euphoric moments of the festival and its less joyful aftermath: “It was as much an endpoint as a beginning, a holiday of naïveté and dumb luck before the realities of capitalism resumed.”

Still, there was a “sense of shared humanity and cooperation,” Pareles writes. “One lunatic with a gun could have changed everything. The Altamont Festival, marred all day by violence, took place only four months later. Miraculously, at Woodstock, there was none.”

How is your generation different from the one that attended Woodstock? How are the challenges the world faces now different, and how are they similar? What do you think will be the seminal cultural event of your generation? Why?

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