The collection consists of ephemeral political materials distributed by and for members of national organizations and political committees. The majority of the materials relate to New Left organizations from the 1960s, but examples from the 1940s to the early 1990s are also included. Many of the materials are concerned with civil rights, anti-war protest, feminism, and economic policy. Current events in China, Cuba, Europe and the Middle East are also discussed. Organizations represented include Students for a Democratic Society, Southern Student Organizing Committee, Radical Education Project, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and several others. The collection offers primary source material to researchers interested in the various social protest movements of the 1960s.
The Underground Newspaper collection contains independent publications produced by community and student associations throughout North America. Collection spans from 1880-2013. Bulk of the collection is from the 1960s and 1970s members of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS). The Collection includes student copied newsletters, city presses, Native American nation publications, and University periodicals.
A couple of individual underground newspaper titles:
Included as a subcollection in the Student Activism Collection, below.
Reveal Digital’s Student Activism collection aims to provide access to unique, yet essential, primary sources documenting the deep and broad history of student organizing in the United States.
"The Freedom Archives contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings which date from the late-1960s to the mid-90s and chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements. We are also in the process of scanning and uploading thousands of historical documents which enrich our media holdings. Our collection includes weekly news, poetry, music programs; in-depth interviews and reports on social and cultural issues; numerous voices from behind prison walls; diverse activists; and pamphlets, journals and other materials from many radical organizations and movements."
Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century. Many titles from the Underground Newspaper Collection are included (but the collections here were not completely digitized).
Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements focuses on unearthing and digitizing the histories of civil rights activism by the everyday citizens of Black, Latine, Indigenous, and Asian American/Pacific Islander communities.
The Great Speckled Bird was one of several underground newspapers that appeared in the United States in the 1960s. Published in Atlanta from 1968 to 1976, The Bird, as it was commonly known, was a new, radical voice from the South. The Bird stood out among the alternative press for the quality of its writing, its cover art and its fearless opinions and reporting on a range of topics—national and local politics, the counterculture, women’s issues, gay liberation, reproductive choice, music, art, and more.
This collection contains page images and searchable text of about 900 periodicals created by or for U.S. military personnel during the Vietnam War era. Most were produced underground by U.S. soldiers or veterans who opposed the war, using mimeograph machines or other inexpensive technology.