Description
Book SynopsisHow 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? In Smoking Typewriters, 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 ta
Trade Review... this is a work of serious scholarship ... * Roz Kaveney, Times Literary Supplement *
Smoking Typewriters is an impressively researched history of the emergence of the underground press in the 1960s. ... a work with remarkable contemporary resonance * Aurelie Basha i Novosejt, Journal of Contemporary History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 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
