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What´s the general definition of the countercultural of the 1960s?
The counterculture of the 1960s refers to a cultural event that was developed mainly in the United States and United Kingdom and spread throughout much of the western world between 1960 and 1973. The movement gained momentum during the U.S. government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam. 
As the 1960s progressed, widespread tensions developed in American society tended to flow along generational lines regarding the war in Vietnam, race relations, sexual mores, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, experimentation with psychoactive drugs and differing interpretations of the American Dream. 
New cultural forms emerged, including the pop music of the British band The Beatles and the concurrent rise of hippie culture, which led to the rapid evolution of a youth subculture that emphasized change and experimentation. In addition to the Beatles, many songwriters, singers and musical groups from the United Kingdom and America came to impact the counterculture movement.
If the World Wars defined the first half of the twentieth century, the sixties defined the second half, providing the pivot on which modern times have turned. From popular music to individual liberties, the tastes and convictions of the Western world are. Let’s see some of the movements which appeared in the 1960s.
What was the importance of the 1960s?
The American Civil Rights Movement, a key element of the larger Counterculture movement, involved the use of applied nonviolence to assure the equal rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution would apply to all citizens. Many states illegally denied many of these rights to African Americans, and this was successfully addressed in the early and mid-1960s in several major nonviolent movements. Main article: American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) See also: Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SNCC, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Chicago Freedom Movement. Much of the 1960s counterculture originated on college campuses. The 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, which had its roots in the Civil Rights Movement of the American South, was one early example. At Berkeley a group of students began to identify themselves as having interests as a class that were at odds with the interests and practices of the University and its corporate sponsors. Other rebellious young people, who were not students, also contributed to the Free Speech Movement. Main article: Free Speech Movement. The New Left is a term used in different countries to describe left-wing movements that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. They differed from earlier leftist movements that had been more oriented towards labor activism, and instead adopted social activism. In Trafalgar Square, London in 1958, in an act of civil disobedience, 60000–100000 protesters made up of students and pacifists converged in what was to become the ‘ban the Bomb’ demonstrations. Opposition to the Vietnam War began in 1964 on United States College campuses. Student activism became a dominant theme among the baby boomers, growing to include many Americans. Exemptions and deferments for the middle and upper classes resulted in the induction of a disproportionate number of poor, working-class, and minority registrant. Countercultural books such as MacBird by Barbara Garson and much of the counterculture music encouraged a spirit of non-conformism and anti-establishmentarianism. By 1968, the year after a large march to the United Nations in New York City and a large protest at the Pentagon were undertaken, the majority of Americans opposed the war.
The role of women as full-time homemakers in industrial society was challenged in 1963, when American feminist Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, giving momentum to the women's movement and influencing what many called Second-wave feminism. Other activists, such as Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, either organized, influenced, or educated many of a younger generation of women to endorse and expand feminist thought. Main article: Feminist Movement in the United States (1963–1982). Counterculture environmentalists were quick to grasp the early (i.e., 1970s) analyses of the reality and the import of the Hubert ‘peak oil’ prediction. More broadly they saw that the dilemmas of energy derivation would have implications for geo-politics, lifestyle, environment, and other dimensions of modern life. 
The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against the police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village, a neighborhood of New York City. This is frequently cited as the first instance in American history when people in the homosexual community fought back against a government-sponsored system that persecuted sexual minorities, and became the defining event that marked the start of the Gay Rights Movement in the United States and around the world. Main article: Gay Liberation.
In the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco organized by artist Michael Bowen, the media's attention on the counterculture was fully activated. In 1967 Scott McKenzie's rendition of the song ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’ brought as many as 100,000 young people from all over the world to celebrate San Francisco's ‘Summer of Love.’
 During the 1960s, a second group of casual LSD users evolved and expanded into a subculture that extolled the mystical and religious symbolism often engendered by the drug's powerful effects, and advocated its use as a method of raising consciousness. The personalities associated with the subculture, gurus such as Dr. Timothy Leary and psychedelic rock musicians such as the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane and The Beatles soon attracted a great deal of publicity, generating further interest in LSD. 
The popularization of LSD outside of the medical world was hastened when individuals such as Ken Kesey participated in drug trials and liked what they saw. Tom Wolfe wrote a widely read account of these early days of LSD's entrance into the non-academic world in his book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which documented the cross-country, acid-fueled voyage of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on the psychedelic bus ‘Furthur’ and the Pranksters' later 'Acid Test' LSD parties. In 1965, Sandoz laboratories stopped its still legal shipments of LSD to the United States for psychiatric use, after a request from the U.S. government concerned about its use.
By April 1966, LSD use had become so widespread that Time Magazine warned about its dangers. In December 1966, the exploitation film Hallucination Generation was released. This was followed by The Trip (film) in 1967 and Psych-Out in 1968. 
Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters helped shape the developing character of the 1960s counterculture  when they embarked on a cross-country voyage during the summer of 1964 in a psychedelic school bus named ‘Further.’ 
Beginning in San Francisco in the mid 1960s, a new culture of ‘free love’ arose, with millions of young people embracing the hippie ethos and preaching the power of love and the beauty of sex as a natural part of ordinary life. By the start of the 1970s it was acceptable for colleges to allow co-educational housing where male and female students mingled freely. This aspect of the counterculture continues to impact modern society. he Situationist International was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented general wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France. With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th-century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillmentof human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality. The Counterculture Revolution was affected by cinema. Films like Bonnie and Clyde struck a chord with the youth as ‘the alienation of the young in the 1960s was comparable to the director's image of the 1930s.’Films of this time also focused on the changes happening in the world. Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969) focused on the counterculture of the time. Medium Cool portrayed the 1968 Democratic Convention alongside the 1968 Chicago police riots which has led to it being labeled as “a fusion of cinema-vérité and political radicalism”.
One film-studio attempt to cash in on the hippie trend was 1968's Psych-Out, which is in contrast to the film version of Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant which some say portrayed the generation as ‘doomed.’ The music of the era was represented by films such as 1970s Woodstock, a documentary of the music festival.
 In France the New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never been a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm and its an example of European art cinema. Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm.