This enlightening book offers a collection of histories of underground papers from the Vietnam Era as written and told by key staff members of the time. Their stories (as well as those to be included in Part 2, forthcoming) represent a wide range of publications: counterculture, gay, lesbian, feminist, Puerto Rican, Native American, Black, socialist, Southern consciousness, prisoner's rights, New Age, rank-and-file, military, and more. The edition includes forewords by former Chicago Seed editor Abe Peck, radical attorney William M. Kunstler, and Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos, along with an introductory essay by Ken Wachsberger. Wachsberger notes that the underground press not only produce a few well-known papers but also was truly national and diverse in scope. His goal is to capture the essence of "the countercultural community." A fundamental resource for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of a dramatic era in U.S. history.
This enlightening book offers a collection of histories of underground papers from the Vietnam Era as written and told by key staff members of the time. Their stories, building on those presented in Part 1, represent a wide range of publications: countercultural, gay, lesbian, feminist, Puerto Rican, Native American, Black, socialist, Southern consciousness, prisoners’ rights, New Age, rank-and-file, military, and more. Wachsberger notes that the underground press not only produced a few well-known papers but also was truly national and diverse in scope. His goal is to capture the essence of “the countercultural community.” This book will be a fundamental resource for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of a dramatic era in U.S. history, as well as offering a younger readership a glimpse into a generation of idealists who rose up to challenge and improve government and society.
In 1963, Michigan State University, the nation’s first land grant college, attracted a record number of National Merit Scholars by offering competitive scholarships. One of these exceptional students was Michael Kindman. After the beginning of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, Kindman, in line to be editor-in-chief of the official MSU student newspaper, felt compelled to seek a more radical forum of intellectual debate. In 1965, he dropped out of school and founded The Paper, one of the first five members of Underground Press Syndicate. This gripping autobiography follows Kindman’s inspiring journey of self-discovery, from MSU to Boston, where he joined the staff of Avatar, unaware that the large commune that controlled the paper was a charismatic cult. Five years later, he fled the commune’s outpost in Kansas and headed to San Francisco, where he came out as a gay man, changed his name to Mica, and continued his work as an activist and visionary.
What caused the New Left rebellion of the 1960s? In Smoking Typewriters, historian John McMillian argues that the "underground press" contributed to the New Left's growth and cultural organization in crucial, overlooked ways.
The Reagan era is usually seen as an era of unheralded prosperity, and as a high-watermark of Republican success. President Ronald Reagan's belief in "Reaganomics", his media-friendly sound-bites and "can do" personality have come to define the era. However, this was also a time of domestic protest and unrest. Under Reagan the US was directly involved in the revolutions which were sweeping the Central Americas- El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala -and in Nicaragua Reagan armed the Contras who fought the Sandinistas. This book seeks to show how the left within the US reacted and protested against these events. The Nation, Verso Books and the Guardian exploded in popularity, riding high on the back of popular anti-interventionist sentiment in America, while the film-maker Oliver Stone led a group of directors making films with a radical left-wing message. The author shows how the1980s in America were a formative cultural period for the anti-Reaganites as well as the Reaganites, and in doing so charts a new history.
In a collective voice calling for peace tracing back to pre-World War II, Don't Call Us Girls follows the protests of women and their allies from the White House to the Arc de Triomphe, heralding their impact on today's world. Don’t Call Us Girls examines the importance of women’s participation in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and the international anti-war movement. This collective voice for peace, and an end to nuclear proliferation, reached back to before the Second World War and then firmly embedded itself during the war years when women assumed such important roles in the workplace that Franklin D. Roosevelt called them the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’. When the men returned from war, women were encouraged by forces as powerful as government agencies and eminent psychiatrists to return to their ‘place’ at home. And return home they did, only to realize that they could use the skills they practiced as housewives to begin organizing themselves into groups that would start a wave of protest action that swept through the late 1950s, gathering up the Civil Rights Movement as it hurtled ever forward through the next two decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, no institution or convention was sacred—many aspects of women’s lives were fair game for criticism, protest, and change. In this no-holds-barred era, women debated everything from international nuclear policies, pay equity and child care for women, to reproductive rights and sexual politics. They protested in the streets, outside the White House, in Trafalgar Square, at the Arc de Triomphe, on university campuses, and just about anywhere else they would be heard. They were tired of the role society had cast for them and they would not rest until they saw the substantial change that seemed promising with the emergence of Second Wave Feminism in the 1970s. While we still live in a patriarchal society, we have these women to thank for many of the freedoms we now enjoy. If they have taught us anything, it is never to stop pushing back against the patriarchy and to rest only when we are truly equal. The final chapter of Don’t Call Us Girls reminds us that there is still a lot of work to do.
Rooted in extensive archival research and personal interviews, A Queer Capital is the first history of LGBT life in the nation’s capital. Revealing a vibrant past that dates back more than 125 years, the book explores how lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals established spaces of their own before and after World War II, survived some of the harshest anti-gay campaigns in the U.S., and organized to demand equal treatment. Telling the stories of black and white gay communities and individuals, Genny Beemyn shows how race, gender, and class shaped the construction of gay social worlds in a racially segregated city. From the turn of the twentieth century through the 1980s, Beemyn explores the experiences of gay people in Washington, showing how they created their own communities, fought for their rights, and, in the process, helped to change the country. Combining rich personal stories with keen historical analysis, A Queer Capital provides insights into LGBT life, the history of Washington, D.C., and African American life and culture in the twentieth century.
