[1] It is based partly on Jon Margolis' book The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964.

[3] It is also the year of Freedom Summer, an initiative by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register African-Americans in Mississippi, the subsequent murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, three CORE activists, in Mississippi by white supremacists that created a national sensation, and the Harlem riot of 1964, culminating in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley.

A recurrent theme of the film is its departure as a presidential election year, with President Lyndon B. Johnson running as the expected Democratic Party nominee and the nomination of U.S.

Senator Barry Goldwater selected through a grassroots campaign for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, that defines the future divisions of the US political party competition.

The 1964 interviews were conducted in 2014 and made accessible online in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting[4] in 2018.