Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, universities throughout the United States experienced waves of protest against the Vietnam War. These protests occurred at a pivotal moment in American history, when protests for equal rights for women, African Americans, and other minority groups were simultaneously erupting across the nation. This period also saw the birth of the environmental movement and the student rights movement. Merging idealism, a commitment to equality, and an increasing skepticism of the government and institutional authorities; these movements and protests were not isolated from each other, but instead were part of a shared culture of rebellion. In many ways, student protests against the Vietnam War encapsulated all of these movements. These protests voiced concerns for the environment in response to the use of napalm and extensive bombing in Vietnam and Cambodia, and they questioned the white, middle-class, Judeo-Christian, male worldview that undermined struggles for human and civil rights. These student protests transpired on college campuses, raising questions concerning the role and rights of college students during times of national and social upheaval.
The history of the student antiwar movement has been told by a diverse range of scholars and other professionals, including historians, sociologists, journalists, and creators of documentaries. This research can, at the very least, be broken into three major categories that reflect major paradigms within the historiography of these protests. First, the initial wave of research on the outbreak of antiwar protests on college campuses explored the critical role that environment played in the protests. This paradigm suggests that it was the nature of the college as a venue that prompted the emergence of student protest, with the result that this research tends to emphasize the changes in campus administration and culture that impacted college students during the period between World War II and the Vietnam War.
Second, moving away from the research that almost overstated the impact of the college environment, research that started in the late 1970s began to examine the antiwar protests as intricately woven together with other social movements and protests of the time. This research often isolated the student antiwar movement to specific college campuses in order to chart how else social unrest was manifested from between the 1950s and 1970s. Finally, in more recent years, a body of scholarship has emerged that challenges assumptions that the most critical antiwar protests occurred at large, elite colleges on the East Coast and West Coast. This scholarship has endeavored to incorporate smaller and often more rural colleges and universities to create a broader and more complex understanding of the antiwar protests at colleges during the late 1960s and early 1970s.