DISCLAIMER

The Hall-Hoag Collection includes materials that may depict graphic violence, and may contain graphic sexual content as well as offensive views and language. The views expressed in the content of the Hall Hoag Collection in no way represent the views of Brown University, the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, or Arcadia Fund.
 

About the Project

 
 

Through the Divided America project, the John Hay Library will digitize and make available material representing extremes of political thought from 1946 through the 1990s in the United States. With a $250,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission’s Access to Historical Records: Major Initiatives program and a $1.5 million grant from the Arcadia Fund, the project will take on the digitization of about three-fourths of the holdings in the Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda. Consisting of nearly 200,000 individual items from over 5,000 organizations, the Hall-Hoag Collection is the country’s largest research collection documenting the ideas and activities of dissenting right- and left-wing U.S. groups, offering a trove of material that will help scholars and journalists further understand our current political moment. 

This work builds upon the previous work to process part II of the collection to make 2,400 linear feet of material accessible through a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) grant.

 

About the Collection

The collection focuses on printed organizational literature, often ephemeral, some for circulation among adherents and others used to proselytize. The collection consists largely of pamphlets and leaflets, with smaller numbers of photos, audio–visual items, manuscripts, and monographs published by Anti-Abortion organizations; Anti-Integrationist organizations; Anti-Semitic and Racist political parties; Christian Identity organizations; Communist organizations; Communist political parties; Communist publishers; Congressional investigating committees; Cults and Alternative religions; Extreme Left-Wing publishers; Ku Klux Klan organizations; LaRouche organizations; Marxist-Leninist organizations; Militant Anti-Communist organizations; Militant Populist organizations; Neo-Nazi organizations; Pacifist organizations; Racial and Ethnic Consciousness organizations; Right-Wing Christian religious organizations; and Right-Wing publishers.

About the Project Archivist

As of October 2022, the project responsibilities for the collection have been taken over by project archivist, Ariel Flowers. Ms. Flowers comes to Brown University after receiving her M.S. in Archives Management from Simmons University in 2021. Before that she earned a B.A. in History and Gender Studies from the University of Arizona in 2013. She has worked at other archives and libraries including the Public Library of Brookline in Massachusetts , Tufts University and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard.

Previous project archivists that have worked on Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda projects are Jordan Jancosek and Daniel Johnson.