The grand narrative of the 1960s is of a worldwide, socio-cultural movement with a reform agenda. The year ‘1968’ plays a central role in the discourse about the ‘Sixties worldwide’. This doubles up as a reference to a socio-cultural reality on the one hand and a metaphor for change on the other. The Netherlands also had to face an expanding, selfaware youth culture, rowdy student movements, alternative lifestyles and calls for emancipation. These developments, both historically and historiographically, do not necessarily run parallel with the concept of the Global Sixties. This paper traces the progress of the study of the Netherlands in the 1960s, which was carried out from a national perspective, and examines how the research associated with it relates to the international context mentioned earlier.