Welcome to the 1960s, a decade of sit-ins and teach-ins, hemlines that were getting shorter and hair that was getting longer, and laid-back family road trips, leading onward to the welcome sight of an orange Howard Johnson’s roof and its 28 flavors of happiness.

In a decade of pushing boundaries, the first Peace Corps volunteers set off for Africa in 1961. The Beatles were soon crossing the ocean in the opposite direction, hitting the shores of North America in 1964. Dashing Sidney Poitier won the Oscar for best actor for his work on the big screen that same year, while on smaller screens, the Peanuts gang learned the meaning of Christmas for the very first time in 1965.

But there were growing pains.

By the time Bob Dylan declared “The Times They Are a-Changin’” in 1964, African American students had boldly taken their seats at a North Carolina lunch counter, actor Marilyn Monroe and America’s young president were dead, and the first U.S. combat troops would soon be packing their bags for a March 1965 deployment to Vietnam.

The media chronicled a changing society — and in turn changed society, as it had done so often before.

From the first televised presidential debate, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, on Sept. 26, 1960, to Walter Cronkite’s 1965 reporting from a helicopter in Vietnam, television brought critical and often stark images of the world into the living rooms of America.

Recognizing a growing societal and political role, television networks would dedicate a larger share of attention and airtime to civic matters in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, national evening newscasts filled 30 instead of a brief 15 minutes. Even children’s programming changed its tune, as Pennsylvania’s own Fred Rogers welcomed children to a television neighborhood where topics like war, mental health and divorce were not off-limits.

There was a lot to cover, from the election that put a 43-year-old Kennedy in a Camelot White House to the moon landing he envisioned, nine years later. And those images, some might say, changed everything.

After baseball legend Jackie Robinson was barred from a “whites only” terminal waiting room in Greenville, S.C., the 1960s began with a thousand people marching 10 miles to the airport, singing “America the Beautiful” in protest on Jan. 1, 1960.

Just one month later, four African American college students took their seats at a segregated Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth lunch counter, where they were not served lunch.

The decade of protest was underway.

Northern college students and other activists boarded integrated buses in Washington, D.C., in May 1961, for a summer of Freedom Rides into states like Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Arrested, threatened and attacked, more than 400 Freedom Riders risked their lives to protest segregation in the South.

In 1962, James Meredith became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi, a victory against segregation. But his arrival sparked a violent riot of 2,500 students, Klansmen and others, inducing President Kennedy to deploy more than 31,000 troops to protect Meredith and quell the violence.

Kennedy would once again deploy troops when Alabama Gov. George Wallace attempted to block two African American students from registering at the University of Alabama the following summer.

It was in this context of simmering racial tension and violence that 250,000 people descended on the nation’s capital on Aug. 28, 1963, to advocate for civil rights: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

The speech inspired listeners but did not de-escalate the violence. Less than a month later, on Sept. 15, 1963, four young girls attending Sunday school were killed when a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., and in 1964, three Freedom Riders were murdered while attempting to register African Americans voters in Mississippi.

Following their June 21 murders, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin; mandated equal access to public places and employment; and ordered the desegregation of schools.

The cost of social change was tallied in the deaths of innocents as well as the assassination of prominent social and political leaders. Their deaths reflected the real and symbolic power of individuals to inspire and mobilize others.

Civil rights activist and World War II U.S. Army veteran Medgar Evers, 37, was fatally shot on June 12, 1963, in his front yard in Jackson, Miss. As the first NAACP field secretary in the state, Evers had pushed for desegregation, organized boycotts and investigated incidents of racial violence.

One of the defining moments of the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy, 46, was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, seated next to his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. His funeral was one of the first events of such magnitude to be carried live on television.

Influential and outspoken, Malcolm X, 39, born Malcolm Little, was killed Feb. 21, 1965, while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. He was shot multiple times by members of the Nation of Islam after a contentious departure from the organization.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was killed April 4, 1968, on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., while speaking with several of his associates. King was in town to support a strike of sanitation workers. His death sparked riots in more than 100 cities and a surge of activism that motivated the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act.

Attorney Gen. Robert Kennedy, 42, was killed June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Perceived by many to be a symbol of hope and unity, Kennedy had announced his candidacy for U.S. president just three months earlier.

The momentum of the Civil Rights Movement set a template for other social and political causes.

The women’s movement accelerated with the publication of Betty Friedan's “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, and the 1968 election of the first African American woman to hold a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Shirley Chisholm. Not to be overlooked was the impact of “the pill,” approved by the FDA in 1960.

The environmental movement gained momentum with Allegheny County-native Rachel Carson's “Silent Spring” in 1962, the Clean Air Act in 1963 and the Wilderness Act in 1964. But it was a fire on the Cuyahoga River on June 22, 1969, that brought the issue of environmental degradation into unprecedented resolution, sparking a sense of urgency among American citizens and lawmakers.

Just five days later, a spark of a different nature launched the modern gay rights movement when riots erupted outside the Stonewall Inn, a gay nightclub in New York City, following a police raid on June 27, 1969. Six days of protests and violent clashes with police led to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front and other activist organizations.

Although the American Indian Movement was founded in 1968 to address police brutality and discrimination in Minneapolis, it made national headlines when 89 Native American activists and their supporters — a group swelling to more than 600 people at its peak — took possession of Alcatraz Island on Nov. 20, 1969. The 19-month occupation was the first of several key events to draw attention to issues such as treaty rights, sovereignty and living conditions in tribal communities.

While violence and tension reigned at home, the peace of the nation was also threatened from outside its borders.

After a U.S. spy plane discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, on Oct. 14, 1962, President Kennedy responded by imposing a blockade of the island, preventing the USSR from further movement in the region. A 13-day confrontation between the superpowers, known as the Cuban missile crisis, was finally resolved through secret negotiations, narrowly averting a nuclear catastrophe.

Shortly thereafter, on the other side of the world, America's involvement in Vietnam escalated precipitously.

More than 3,000 Marines, the first U.S. ground troops, landed in the coastal city of Da Nang on March 8, 1965. They would be followed by 2.7 million more husbands, sons, best friends and others serving as conflict troops in Vietnam.

Many would not come home. That first year, 1,863 soldiers died, and another 6,143 in 1966, according to the National Archives. Over the next three years, America lost 11,153, 16,899 and 11,780 soldiers, respectively, representing approximately 98% of counties in the U.S. Hundreds of others were held as prisoners of war, and 304,000 U.S. soldiers were wounded in the conflict zone.

Despite the massive military buildup, the conflict remained a stalemate, with heavy casualties and growing anti-war sentiment back home.

Like other “movements” of the 1960s, the anti-war movement started small but tapped into a widespread and growing sense of desperation and anger. Men burned their draft cards. Students held marches and “teach-ins” to discuss the war. About half the 100,000 people assembled for an Oct. 21, 1967, protest in Washington, D.C., later crossed the Potomac for a sit-in on the Pentagon steps.

Overall, the alliance of students, activists and even veterans in the anti-war movement was a powerful force in highlighting the human and financial costs of the war.

Each week in the 1960s, Ed Sullivan and Lawrence Welk offered relatively tame televised rituals that preserved societal norms even while dipping their toes into new cultural waters. For example, Welk invited African American tap dancer Arthur Duncan to join his show in 1964, while the Beatles made their legendary American debut Feb. 9 of the same year on Sullivan’s show.

But outside their studios, many more Americans were breaking the norms of the postwar generation and adopting new forms of self-expression.

The counterculture movement, as it came to be known, was closely tied to anti-war protests, as young people rallied against the Vietnam War and advocated for peace, civil rights and social change.

Groovy fashion and psychedelic music were among the calling cards of hippie culture, with men and women likely to sport long hair, colorful clothing and accessories like beads and sandals.

What better way to celebrate this newfound liberation and its mind-expanding opportunities than with an outdoor music festival in upstate New York?

Thus it was that more than 400,000 people converged on a dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y., for “3 days of peace & music,” Aug. 15 to 18, 1969.

A full 40 miles from the town of Woodstock, the festival would come to symbolize the peak of the 1960s counterculture movement with its messages of peace, free love and funky music. Bluesy rocker Janis Joplin, electrifying guitarist Jimi Hendrix and legendary The Grateful Dead were among the star-studded lineup.

Under sunny skies and a balmy 85 degrees, revelers arrived only to be doused with thunderstorms that turned the grounds into a muddy mess. But fear not: these unexpected conditions only added to the distinctive ambience of the event.

The intense competition for players, fans and television contracts prompted rival National Football League and the American Football League to merge, with its champion to be crowned at the AFL-NFL World Championship Game.

The first “supergame” was held Jan. 15, 1967, under clear skies at the Los Angeles Coliseum, where Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers defeated Hank Stram’s Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 after scoring 21 unanswered points in the second half.

Fans were treated to a musical halftime show for the ages: performances by the marching bands of the University of Arizona and Grambling State, trumpeter Al Hirt, and the Anaheim High School Ana-Hi-Steppers drill team and flag girls.

In a Sept. 12, 1962, speech at Rice University in Houston, President Kennedy famously promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” he said.

And fewer than seven years later, Apollo 11 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took that “one small step” on to the surface of the moon July 20, 1969, as 93% of Americans and an estimated 650 million people worldwide watched the moment, truly a “giant leap for mankind,” on their television sets.

Despite the chaotic jostling of the 1960s sociopolitical landscape and the monumental scope of crisis on the global front, Americans of the decade still made dinner, went shopping, had fun and worried about the future.

The 1960s were not known for haute cuisine. Americans munched on Pillsbury Space Food Sticks, first developed for NASA astronauts, and clutched their mini forks for a highly social but perhaps not highly sanitary Fondue. Other prized and fancy meals included “pigs in a blanket,” Swedish meatballs and TV dinners, often served on TV trays.

McDonald’s entrepreneurs invented the hunger-busting, Pennsylvania-born Big Mac (1967), the iconic Shamrock Shake (1967) and, to address declining sales on Fridays, the Filet-O-Fish (1962).

New products like Doritos (1964), Starburst (1960), Chips Ahoy! (1963), Gatorade (1965), Cool Whip (1966) and Pringle’s Newfangled Potato Chips (1968) made 1960s life snackier if not healthier.

Americans of the 1960s also said “hello” to future corporate giants like Nike (1964), Walmart (1962), Intel (1968), Subway (1965), Comcast (1963) and Taco Bell (1962).

But it was the beginning of the end for manual typewriters and rotary telephones … and the actual end of Studebaker automobiles (1966) and black and white television broadcasts (1966).

Katrina Jesick Quinn is a contributing writer for the Butler Eagle and a professor at Slippery Rock University. She is an editor of “From the Arctic to the Orient: Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age” (McFarland) and “The Civil War Soldier and the Press” (Routledge).