The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World (2017 - 2017)

Episode 1

The first episode looks at how ideas, music and lifestyles from Asia, Europe and the American left became entwined in California. It traces the roots of the hippies back to a 19th-century German sect of wandering naturalists called Lebensreform, who brought their freethinking ideas about nature to California after the Second World War. There, they merged with a growing interest in eastern mystical concepts of human nature imported to America by maverick British thinkers like Aleister Crowley and Aldous Huxley. Add to this mix a wonder drug called LSD, first developed by the CIA, and a wave of student activists and anti-war protesters agitating for revolution, and you have the astonishing story of how these forces came together to give birth to the Summer of Love in San Francisco, 1967.