During the “long sixties,” baby boomers raised on democratic postwar ideals demanded a more egalitarian society for all. While a few became vocal leaders at universities across Canada, nearly 90% of Canada’s young people went straight to work after high school. There, they brought the anti-authoritarian spirit of the youth revolt to the labour movement. While university-based activists combined youth culture with a new brand of radicalism to form the New Left, young workers were defying their aging union leaders in a wave of renewed militancy. In Rebel Youth, Ian Milligan looks at these converging currents, demonstrating convincingly how they were part of the same youth phenomenon.

Ian Milligan (ONTARIO, CANADA) is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo, where he also serves as an associate vice president in the Office of Research. Milligan is the author of The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age and History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research.

Ian Milligan's profile page

• Short-listed, The Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, Canadian Historical Association

A highly readable and important work that brings young Canadians who were in the workforce – rather than attending university – into the conversation about what the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s were all about.

James Pitsula, author of New World Dawning: The Sixties at Regina Campus

...Milligan’s study is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the long sixties, which highlights the diversity and complexity of the era that has heretofore escaped popular memories of it.

British Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 29 No. 2, Fall 2016