This week’s post contains a few items from Boston during the 1970s about the Women’s Liberation Movement. One item is a flyer for a rally to have taken place April 17, 1971 in Boston Common. There is an additional item from World Socialist Party of the United States. This is a political sticker handed out around what I am guessing was the midterm elections of 1970.
Category: Collection Highlights (Page 2 of 11)
Prophetic Herald was founded in Spokane, Washington by Alexander Schiffner in 1962. The Hall Hoag collection contains items from the 1960s through the 1990s, although it is hard to determine if it is still being published.
It is a religious publication based on the concept that Christ will soon return to Earth. See the image below for more details on their beliefs. Prophetic Herald was published monthly on a variety of topics revolving around the prophecies of the bible.
The Washington Peace Center was started in 1963 by Larry Scott to “education, support, and provide resources to activist groups.”[1] Focusing mostly on anti-war and nonviolence the Washington Peace Center has opposed the war in Vietnam, nuclear arms proliferation, and the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay among other things. Additionally, the Peace Center has helped advocate for groups opposed to racism and gender/sexuality bias. The Washington Peace Center is still in existence today.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Peace_Center
On March 12th and 13th I participated in the 2015 Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives Unconference and Symposium: Innovation, Collaboration, and Models at the University of Pennsylvania During the Unconference I ran a workshop on using OpenRefine to clean and gather data. Most of the concepts discussed in the workshop have been used during our work on the Hall Hoag Collection. Notes from the workshop can be found in this Google Doc.
I had a great couple of days in Philadelphia and encourage everyone to look into some of the other CLIR funded projects.
The White American Resistance or White Aryan Resistance is a white supremacist organization founded by Tom Mezinger who was a grand wizard of the KKK. [1] Mezinger ran various groups from the mid-1970s through the 1990s and even ran for political office in the State of California. WAR gained a certain amount of exposure throughout the late 1980s due to various appearances on television talk shows.[2] WAR is a self-identified racist group and still has a website now: http://www.resist.com/
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Aryan_Resistance
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Metzger_(white_supremacist)
The Student Mobilization Committee was formed in 1966 “to coordinate opposition to U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam among college and high school students.”[1] Originally named The Vietnam Day Committee the SMC organized protests on campuses and in cities in addition to being one of the first groups that included civilians and soldiers alike.[2] Based on a letter from 1969, the SMC had centers in 15 cities[3] around the country but began to disband, like many anti-Vietnam groups in the early 1970s (1973) in conjunction with the U.S. beginning to withdrawing troops from Vietnam.[4]
I have included two flyers below from the Boston area center of the SMC.
[1] http://militarylies.typepad.com/gi_movement_archives/student-mobilization-committee-to-end-the-war-in-vietnam-.html
[2] http://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/vietnam_student.shtml
[3] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1969/jun/05/student-mobilization/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#Opposition_to_U.S._involvement_in_the_Vietnam_War:_1962.E2.80.931973
This week’s post comes of This Week Magazine, a very popular Sunday newspaper supplement from the 1930s through the 1960s. [1] The publication contained fiction, cartoons, and news related articles. The copy displayed below contains an article about the dangers of gossip that was printed sometime in the late 1940s.[2] Unless there was an anti-gossip movement in the 1940s I do not think that this item relates specifically to extremism, but it does seem to reflect a heightened awareness to reputation and character assassination as the Cold War was beginning to ramp up in the 1940s. (The House Committee on Un-American Activities became a standing (permanent) committee in 1945 with black list hearings in 1947.)[3]
In addition there seem to be many sermons online that reference Dr. Cantril, (who is referenced in the article as well) highlighting the dangers of slander by using this anecdote:
Several years ago Dr. Albert H. Cantril, a professor at Princeton University, conducted a series of experiments to demonstrate how quickly rumors spread. He called six students to his office and in “strict confidence” informed them that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were planning to attend the university dance. Within a week, that completely fictitious story had reached nearly every student on campus.[4][5]
The article was written by Howard Whitman.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Week_%28magazine%29
[2] http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19490918&id=WFgaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ICQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5192,6259457
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_Committee
[4] http://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/do-not-slander-one-another-freddy-fritz-sermon-on-grace-86326.asp?Page=2
[5] http://www.mountainretreatorg.net/bible/gossip.shtml
Voo Doo is a humor publication written by students at MIT. Voo Doo was started in 1919 and is typically published once a term. [1] The most recent version of Voo Doo was published in the Spring of 2014 although the future of the paper is a bit uncertain. [2] There is a full archive of Voo Doo online as well as full scanned versions of the publications that I have shared below. [3]
The Hall Hoag collection contains a lot of material published by students of universities as universities became hotbeds for activism in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. What is interesting about Voo Doo (at least in the 70s) is that although it does have humorous sections a lot of the topics covered are similar to what you might see in other student run papers at the time, including divestment in South Africa without taking much of a humorous take on the issues.
[1] http://wiki.mitadmissions.org/Voo_Doo_Magazine
[2] http://web.mit.edu/voodoo/www/news.html
[3] http://web.mit.edu/voodoo/www/news.html
Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers was an anarchist group started in the late 1960s in New York City by Ben Morea and the poet Dan Georgakas prior to groups like the Weather Underground and the Yippies. They were a counter culture group that was “opposed to and resisted on principle any attempt to impose order on the political demonstrations they participated in.” Although primarily in New York, the group spread to other cities like Boston (where the items below are from). By the early 1970s the group was more or less dissolved. [1]
For more information read this interview with Ben Morea: https://libcom.org/history/against-wall-motherfucker-interview-ben-morea
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Against_the_Wall_Motherfuckers
The Izaak Walton League of America is an environmental and outdoor recreation organization founded in 1922 in Chicago, Illinois. The group is named after Izaak Walton, the “father of fly fishing.”[1] The league was involved in getting the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the National Forest Management Act of 1976 passed. [2] The image below comes from the Indiana Division of the Izaak Walton League, one of the many regional divisions of the organization. The Indiana Division has about 5,000 members and has worked on a variety of projects including[3]:
- Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
- Hoosier National Forest
- Boundary Waters Wildlife Wilderness Campaign
- Indiana Remains Nuclear-Free
- Nature Preserves Act
- Grand Kankakee – Path To Restoration
- Indiana’s Wabash River
- Indiana Natural, Scenic and Recreational Rivers Act
- Jackson Hole, Wyoming, National Elk Refuge
- Phosphorous Ban
- Patoka Refuge
The pamphlet below contains some 1966 resolutions from the Indiana Division.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izaak_Walton_League
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izaak_Walton_League
[3] http://www.in-iwla.org/history/history.htm