Communications Department

Álvaro Acevedo Tarazona, professor of the School of History, together with Angie Daniela Ortega Rey and Andrés Correa Lugos, students of the Master’s Degree in History at UIS, will present their new book, Una crónica noticiosa de 1968 en Colombia (A News Chronicle of 1968 in Colombia) next Tuesday, February 1.

The event will take place at Casa de Bolivar, headquarters of the Santander Academy of History, in downtown Bucaramanga, starting at 5:00 p.m. and admission is free. All those interested in attending are cordially invited.

This book derives from research funded by the UIS, which has tried to ask mainly about the way the press records the news of the country and the world in a year in which there was an unprecedented planetary cultural revolution. Because although 1968 is considered to be a cosmopolitan year, the first globalized year, and for this reason, we talk about The Beatles’ Revolution discourse, the effervescence of The Rolling Stones, or David Bowie’s eroticism in the cultural panorama, we ignore the way in which expressions of this type and social, political, and cultural events reached or did not reach Colombia through the press..

In the chapters of the book, readers can learn about what was happening in the country in 1968, in which great news developments occurred and the effects of the planetary cultural revolution were felt in that year, as well as events that impacted the world and entered the homes and daily lives of Colombians through the press, from pink news such as the marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy to Aristotle Onassis or the consumption of fashion and drugs to the student protests in Western Europe and the French May ’68 and worldwide in general, organ transplants, the Hong Kong flu, the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the harsh debates over artificial contraception, or the Olympic Games in Mexico.

“The research also allows us to unveil a large number of problems in Colombia that extend to the present day, among them the struggle between the State and the subversive groups, the vehicular chaos in cities and highways of the country, the inevitable smuggling, the ever-increasing cultivation of marijuana (the cursed drug), serial murders, suicides, impunity or electoral and partisan debates, without discounting a whole universe of cultural transformations typical of a country that is moving from the countryside to the cities and that reveals the contradictions of a provincial society engaged in a vertiginous and unstoppable modernization”, says Alvaro Acevedo Tarazona, co-author of the book.

The book is aimed at students, teachers and professionals in the area of Human Sciences, but also to all those interested in knowing a little more about the recent history of the country and the world.