Hippie Facts for Kids

Young people near the Woodstock music festival in August 1969.

A hippie (sometimes spelled hippy) is a member of a counterculture, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world.

Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, the principal American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, argues that the terms hipster and hippie are derived from the word hip, whose origins are unknown. The word hip in the sense of "aware, in the know" is first attested in a 1902 cartoon by Tad Dorgan, and first appeared in prose in a 1904 novel by George Vere Hobart (1867–1926), Jim Hickey: A Story of the One-Night Stands, where an African-American character uses the slang phrase "Are you hip?"

The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1944. By the 1940s, the terms hip, hep and hepcat were popular in Harlem jazz slang, although hep eventually came to denote an inferior status to hip. In Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, New York City, young counterculture advocates were named hips because they were considered "in the know" or "cool", as opposed to being square, meaning conventional and old-fashioned.

In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, popularized hippie culture, leading to the Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people.

In later years, mobile "peace convoys" of New Age travelers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere. In Australia, hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival. "Piedra Roja Festival", a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970.

Hippie and psychedelic culture influenced 1960s and early 1970s young culture in Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe.

Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, mainstream society has assimilated many aspects of hippie culture. The religious and cultural diversity the hippies espoused has gained widespread acceptance, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a larger audience.

The vast majority of people who had participated in the golden age of the hippie movement were those born during the 1940s as well as the early 1950s. These included the oldest of the Baby Boomers as well as the youngest of the Silent Generation; the latter who were the actual leaders of the movement as well as the pioneers of Rock music.

Images for kids

Contemporary hippie at the Rainbow Gathering in Russia, 2005
American tourists in Thailand, the early 1970s
Junction of Haight and Ashbury Streets, San Francisco, celebrated as the central location of the Summer of Love
Swami Satchidananda giving the opening talk at the Woodstock Festival of 1969
A group of hippies in Tallinn, 1989
Couple attending Snoqualmie Moondance Festival, August 1993
Tie-dyed clothes, associated with hippie culture
A 1967 VW Kombi bus decorated with hand-painting
Monument to the hippie era. Tamil Nadu, India
Hand-crafted Hippie Truck, 1968
Hippie Truck interior
Timothy Leary, family and band on a lecture tour at State University of New York at Buffalo in 1969
As a hippie, Ken Westerfield helped to popularize the alternative sport of Frisbee in the 1960s–70s, that has become today's disc sports
Hippies at the Nambassa 1981 Festival in New Zealand
Goa Gil, original 1960s hippie who later became a pioneering electronic dance music DJ and party organizer, here appearing in the 2001 film Last Hippie Standing

Hippie facts for kids

Images for kids

See also