Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National

Endowment for the Humanities, and the Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory. The show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Nathan Connolly.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

I'm Ed Ayers.

If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians and each week along with

our colleague Brian Ballot, we explore the history of one topic in American history.

We're going to start the show in New York City.

It's late April 1968.

And in the Upper West Side, Columbia University is ablaze with protests in the Vietnam war

and the university's role in the conflict.

The protests were part of a wider counterculture movement in the 1960s that challenged the status quo on everything from foreign policy to the nuclear family.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this tumult, a group of Columbia students were doing something a little different.

Precisely because tensions on the campus were so high, these students wanted to come up with a way to unite their fellow peers around one thing they all had in common, a 1950s childhood.

These students got dressed up in what they saw as 50s Greaser Gear and they sang all these old 50 songs in a very kind of satirical but loving way as well.

And they quickly became very popular at Columbia and they started playing around clubs in New York City.

Daniel Marcus has written about this period and the group that became known as Shanana.

He says Jimmy Hendrix happened to be at one of Shanana's New York City shows.

This was around the time that organizers were getting ready for Woodstock, the 1969 Music Festival that would become a cultural touchstone.

Hendrix was already on the bill but he needed an opener.

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