Speaking on the Senate floor in May 1970, Senator Frank Church (D-Id) observed that the Vietnam War “has already stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart.” The Vietnam War exposed many tensions, in addition to the generational! Throughout the 1960s, the war and stateside movements (the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement, the Feminist Movement, the Antiwar Movement, etc.) revealed fissures within society that divided Americans generationally, by class, by race, and often alienated them from the government. Select three movements on which to focus in your essay about “the Sixties.” How did the key issues for those movements reflect the fundamental transformation that American society underwent between the “age of consensus” of the 1950s and the famously “turbulent” Sixties? Your answer should define what “the Sixties” were and when “the Sixties” happened. Did “the sixties” span 1960-1970, 1961-68, 1963-1975, for example, or other dates?

There is no foolproof way of delineating the sixties as a cultural epoch beyond stating the actual years of its beginning and end—1960 and 1969. That said, the first two or three years of the decade were relatively "quiet" in comparison with what came about later. And the "turmoil" of the period surely spilled over into the 1970ss, with events like the Kent State shootings and the release of the Pentagon Papers. So perhaps we will end up talking mainly about the years from 1963 until late 1972, when the decision was finally made to withdraw US combat troops from Vietnam.
Of the three "movements" to focus on, I would first choose Civil Rights. After the March on Washington in August, 1963, it was (or should have been) impossible for white Americans to persist in their belief that race was not a major issue or that the US could continue with the old, segregated way society was run. When he took office after President Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson, to his credit, fully backed civil rights legislation and appointed Thurgood Marshall as the first African American Supreme Court justice. Yet there was huge resistance in the South to the integration of schools and of public life generally. Conservatives in the North as well during this period acted as if the country was "going downhill" because of the racial changes that were, in fact, inevitable. Police brutality and the rioting in reaction to it in Los Angeles in 1965 and Detroit and Newark in 1967, among other cities, led some pundits to state that the US was approaching "a state of anarchy." But in spite of the violence and turmoil, it's undeniable that by the end of the decade, the racial dynamic had changed for the better. The open, undisguised oppression against African Americans that had characterized the South and to an extent even northern states prior to the sixties had become, or at least was becoming, forever a thing of the past.
A second issue to examine would have to be, of course, the Vietnam War. Though the engagement of US combat forces had begun under JFK, it was not until over a year after his assassination that the US public began really to take notice of the war, as LBJ radically increased the number of troops and escalated the conflict. As the war continued over the years 1965–1967, it became increasingly apparent that no "progress" was being made. The US was evidently bombing the Vietcong and North Vietnamese to Kingdom Come, but the "Communists" showed no signs of giving up. The US "victory" of the Tet Offensive in early 1968 did nothing to bring the war closer to an end. By that year, even conservative people were questioning the wisdom of US involvement. Young people in urban areas, especially on the east and west coasts, were almost universally opposed to the war. The whole idea of being drafted to fight in a war halfway around the world began to seem ridiculous, as it was. Few educated people under the age of 30 continued to believe in the old bromides of "my country, right or wrong," and "Communism must be stopped!" and "we've gotta fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em here." The violence that broke out at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 was emblematic of the disordered state in which America found itself. The assassinations of the decade—JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968—exacerbated the awareness, especially of young people, that the world the "older generation" had created was deeply flawed. It was impossible not to be "disillusioned" during such a time. In 1970, when the war was escalated into Cambodia by Richard Nixon—who had gotten himself elected saying he had a "secret plan" to end the war—the shooting of student protesters at Kent State led to strikes by students at multiple universities. It would not be until nearly three years after this, in early 1973, that US combat engagement in Southeast Asia finally was brought to an end.
The third point about the decade involves the social changes involving sexuality, previously taboo subjects, and the portrayal of conflicts relating to these issues in television, film, and music. The introduction of the birth-control pill in 1960 led to greater sexual freedom. Because of this and the entry of more and more women into the work force, marriage was increasingly postponed and considered simply an option in relationships. The discussion of sexual topics in film became more and more explicit. By the middle to latter part of the decade with movies such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Midnight Cowboy, there was a startling (at the time) increase in frankness about sex, nudity, explicit language, and graphic violence. In television, though it lagged behind film in those pre-cable days, boundaries began to be pushed as well, especially in comedy revue-type programs such as The Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In. The Smothers Brothers were thrown off the air because they went too far with their political satire. These shows set the stage for Saturday Night Live and the freedom that is a normal part of the media today. Similarly, in music, the British Invasion destroyed the insular nature of the US popular culture. Though the Beatles' early songs were innocent and fun, by 1967, with the release of Sgt. Pepper, pop music dealt openly with the formerly taboo subject of drugs, as did music by others such as the Rolling Stones, the Doors, and Jimi Hendrix.
Each of these factors: civil rights, Vietnam, and freedom of sexuality and of expression, were dividers between conservatives and progressives and old and young in the sixties. Though the changes of that decade have in some sense been irrevocable—there is no going back, and there should not be—it's significant that many of the conflicts that led to those changes are still with us today.