- Woodstock
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/wood"stok'/, n.1. a town in NE Illinois. 11,725.2. a rock music festival held in August of 1969 near Bethel, N.Y.: originally scheduled to be held at Woodstock, N.Y. 1073.
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Rock music festival held near Bethel, N.Y., U.S. (its site was to have been the nearby town of Woodstock), on Aug.15–17, 1969. It attracted about 450,000 young rock fans and featured performers such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Janis Joplin. The festival, the participants of which exhibited extraordinary good feeling in the face of rain and organizational chaos, marked the high point of U.S. youth counterculture in the 1960s. It was documented in the film Woodstock (1970). The festival was revived with mixed success on its 25th and 30th anniversaries.* * *
unincorporated village and town (township) in Ulster county, southeastern New York, U.S., lying in the foothills of the southern Catskills (Catskill Mountains) near the Ashokan Reservoir. Located 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Kingston, the village is a year-round resort and also a noted artists' colony, which developed after 1902 when Ralph R. Whitehead, inspired by William Morris (Morris, William) and John Ruskin (Ruskin, John), established a handicraft community, Byrdcliffe, just north of the village. In 1906 L. Birge Harrison moved the summer school of the Art Students' League of New York there. Artists such as George Bellows (Bellows, George Wesley) were attracted to the colony, which has flourished ever since.Woodstock gave its name to the , a rock festival that was held in Bethel, New York, in neighbouring Sullivan county on August 15–17, 1969. (The festival had been forced to move from its planned location in Woodstock itself after protests from the local townspeople.) The Woodstock Festival occasioned the harmonious gathering of a crowd of about 400,000 young rock-music devotees and marked what is considered the high point of the American youth counterculture of the 1960s. The festival was documented in the motion picture Woodstock (1970) and the book Woodstock: The Oral History (1989). The Woodstock '94 festival was held in Saugerties about 8 miles (13 km) northwest of Woodstock village; a third festival under the Woodstock name took place in 1999 farther upstate near the city of Rome.Woodstock village has art and craft galleries, theatre productions, and frequent music concerts. Area 68 square miles (175 square km). Pop. (2000) 6,241; (2006 est.) 6,217.city, seat of Oxford county, southeastern Ontario, Canada, on the Thames River. The first settler was Zacharius Burtch, who built a log cabin (1798) on a hill overlooking the town site. The actual founder was Rear Admiral Henry Vansittart of the Royal Navy, who in 1834 formed the nucleus of a village, which he named for Woodstock, England.The former town hall (1853), which houses the Woodstock Museum, and Old St. Paul's Church (1834) are both historic buildings. Dairying and livestock rearing are important activities in the area, and Woodstock's manufacturing is well diversified. Oil was discovered just east of the city. Pop. (2006) 35,480.* * *
Universalium. 2010.
