Smoking Typewriters
The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America

Publisher:  Oxford University Press
Year Published:  2011
Pages:  304pp   Price:  25-30   ISBN:  9780195319927
Resource Type:  Book
Cx Number:  CX22766

Provides an examination of the underground press in the 1960s; offers new interpretation of the New Left and explores the origins of 'zines and new media.

Abstract: 
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Publisher's Description

How did the New Left uprising of the 1960s happen? What caused millions of young people -- many of them affluent and college educated--to suddenly decide that American society needed to be completely overhauled? Historian John McMillian shows that one answer to these questions can be found in the emergence of a dynamic underground press in the 1960s. Following the lead of papers like the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, and the Berkeley Barb, young people across the country launched hundreds of mimeographed pamphlets and flyers, small press magazines, and underground newspapers. New and cheap printing technologies had democratized the publishing process, and by the decade's end the combined circulation of underground papers stretched into the millions. Though not technically illegal, these papers were often genuinely subversive, and many who produced and sold them--on street-corners, at poetry readings, gallery openings, and coffeehouses--became targets of harassment from local and federal authorities. With writers who actively participated in the events they described, underground newspapers captured the zeitgeist of the '60s, speaking directly to their readers, and reflecting and magnifying the spirit of cultural and political protest. McMillian gives special attention to the ways underground newspapers fostered a sense of community and played a vital role in shaping the New Left's "movement culture.

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Contents

Introduction
1. "Our Founder, the Mimeograph Machine": Print Culture in Students for a Democratic Society
2. "A Hundred Blooming Papers": Culture and Community in the 1960s Underground Press
3. "Electrical Bananas": The Underground Press and the Great Banana Hoax
4. "All the Protest Fit to Print": The Rise of Liberation News Service
5. "Either We Have Freedom of the Press or We Don't Have Freedom of the Press": The War against Underground Newspapers
6. "Questioning Who Decides": Participatory Democracy in the Underground Press
7. "From Underground to Everywhere": Alternative Media Trends Since the Sixties
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index