New Resource Gives Researchers
Online Access to Trove of 1960s Memorabilia, Artifacts, Interviews,
Photographs, and First-Person Accounts
ALEXANDRIA, VA March 6, 2009—Electronic
publisher Alexander Street Press today announced the release of
The
Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974
,
the first online collection of primary sources to document the key
events, trends, and movements—as well as the look and feel of
everyday life—in 1960s America.
Says Alexander Street’s vice president Eileen
Lawrence, “Fifty years later, the Sixties have now become a key
topic for recollection, research, and analysis. Articles, op-eds,
and classes are popping up everywhere, and younger students want to
‘get it.’ The Alexander Street project gathers up and organizes the
stuff of our shared memories into an enormous collection of primary
materials, ephemera, streaming content, images, historical
interpretation, and personal narratives, accessible and searchable
for the first time. If you want to understand—and have students
grasp—what the Sixties were about and the impact of the decade, we
believe this database is the definitive online research tool.”
When complete, the collection will contain
150,000 pages of cross-searchable content, including thousands
of artifacts from “hidden” archives and other materials not
available anywhere else. The collection includes a wide range of
interviews—with the Beatles, the Weathermen, commune members, and
women beat writers—as well as memoirs and diaries from Vietnam War
veterans, civil rights workers, feminists, and regular people caught
up in the times. Included are autobiographies of Abbie Hoffman,
Medgar Evers, Bill Graham, and Roger Mudd; Civil Rights Commission
hearing transcripts; and books documenting the Sixties, such as
Like a Rolling Stone, by Greil Marcus; Forever Young:
Photographs of Bob Dylan; and The Genius of Huey B. Newton,
originally published by the Black Panther Party. Additional content
is being added monthly, including political buttons, photographs,
news coverage of demonstrations and marches, and rare underground
radio broadcasts.
The Sixties is the most collaborative of
Alexander Street’s projects to date. Through an online form
right on the product’s home page, libraries, researchers, and
individuals can offer their personal or institutional materials or
recommend sources they would like added to the collection. Says
Alexander Street senior editor Shana Wagger, “You can’t understand
the diversity of experience that was 1960s America without casting a
very wide net. The potential is enormous—we are seeing draft cards,
Woodstock mementos, peace poems, radical manifestos, handbills and
flyers from student groups. As we digitize and index these primary
sources, we’re enabling new directions for scholarship and study.”
Says Lawrence, “We’re working closely with customers
who have acquired the collection. For example, the CIC consortium is
one of several groups that purchased The Sixties before it
launched, and we’re working with the participating sites to
incorporate items from their collections—Illinois at Chicago,
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana, Northwestern, Michigan,
Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State, Iowa, Minnesota, and
Wisconsin at Madison. We plan to work with other groups this way, as
well.”
Spanning 1960 to 1974, The Sixties is
organized around 12 central themes: Civil Rights; the Women’s
Movement; the Vietnam War; the Counterculture; Student Activism; the
Environmental Movement; Gay and Lesbian Rights; Law and Government;
the New Left and Emerging Neo-Conservative Movement; Science and
Technology; Mass Media; and Arts, Music, and Leisure.
The collection will also include over a dozen
critical essays from prominent humanities scholars that lend
context and serve as practical guides, introducing students to the
process and methodology of scholarly research with primary sources.
Contact Meg Keller at
mkeller@alexanderstreet.com
for more information.
