WThe GI Underground Press was an underground press movement that emerged among the United State military during the Vietnam War. These were newspapers and newsletters produced without official military approval or acceptance; often furtively distributed under the eyes of "the brass". They were overwhelmingly antiwar and most were anti-military, which tended to infuriate the military command and often resulted in swift retaliation and punishment. Mainly written by rank-and-file active duty or recently discharged GIs, AWOLs and deserters, these publications were intended for their peers and spoke the language and aired the complaints of their audience. They became an integral and powerful element of the larger antiwar, radical and revolutionary movements during those years. This is a history largely ignored, even hidden, in the retelling of the U.S. military's roll in the Vietnam War.
WThe terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant group. In specific recent Asian, American and Western European context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India and Bangladesh in Asia, in the United States and Canada in North America, and the United Kingdom and other western nations. It can also refer to the newspapers produced independently in repressive regimes. In German occupied Europe, for example, a thriving underground press operated, usually in association with the Resistance. Other notable examples include the samizdat and bibuła, which operated in the Soviet Union and Poland respectively, during the Cold War.
WAvatar was an American underground newspaper published in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1967-1968. The newspaper's first issues were published from the headquarters of Broadside magazine in Cambridge.
WThe Black Dwarf was a political and cultural newspaper published between May 1968 and 1972 by a collective of socialists in the United Kingdom. It is often identified with Tariq Ali who edited and published the newspaper until 1970, when the editorial board split between Leninist and non-Leninist currents.
WA Chronicle of Current Events was one of the longest-running samizdat periodicals of the post-Stalin USSR. The unofficial publication reported violations of civil rights and judicial procedure by the Soviet government and responses to those violations by citizens across the Soviet Union. Appearing first in April 1968, it soon became the main voice of the Soviet human rights movement, inside the country and abroad.
WEpistemological Letters was a hand-typed, mimeographed "underground" newsletter about quantum physics that was distributed to a private mailing list, described by the physicist John Clauser as a "quantum subculture", between 1973 and 1984.
WThe Great Speckled Bird was a counterculture underground newspaper based in Atlanta, Georgia from 1968 to 1976. Commonly known as The Bird, it was founded by New Left activists from Emory University and members of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society. Founding editors included Tom and Stephanie Coffin, Howard Romaine and Gene Guerrero Jr. The first issue appeared March 8, 1968, and within 6 months it was publishing weekly. By 1970 it was the third largest weekly newspaper in Georgia with a paid circulation of 22,000 copies. The paper subscribed to Liberation News Service, a leftist news collective. The office of The Great Speckled Bird at the north end of Piedmont Park was firebombed and destroyed on May 6, 1972. In a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books, Jack Newfield et al. note that the bombing occurred after the paper published an exposé of the mayor of Atlanta.
WInternational Times is the name of various underground newspapers, with the original title founded in London in 1966 and running until October 1973. Editors included Hoppy, David Mairowitz, Roger Hutchinson, Peter Stansill, Barry Miles, Jim Haynes and playwright Tom McGrath. Jack Moore, avant-garde writer William Levy and Mick Farren, singer of The Deviants, also edited at various periods.
WKaleidoscope was an underground newspaper that was published in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA]. Founded by John Kois, the radio disk jockey Bob Reitman and John Sahli, it was published from October 6, 1967, to November 11, 1971, printing 105 biweekly issues. The paper's first issue was printed with a borrowed $250 in an edition of 3,500 copies, which sold out in two days.
WThe Friends of Perfection Commune is an American Utopian community in San Francisco, CA. The commune was founded in 1967 on principles of a common treasury, group marriage, free art, gay liberation, and selfless service. They were originally called the Sutter/Scott Street commune, and commonly referred to by non-members as the Kaliflower commune after their newsletter of the same name. Because of their publishing activities, which allowed them to spread their philosophy, they became a significant influence on Bay Area culture. Many members of The Angels of Light, a free psychedelic drag theater group, originally lived in the Kaliflower commune. The name Kaliflower came from their publication of the same name, titled after the Hindu name for the last and most violent age of humankind, the Kali Yuga.
WLeviathan was a New Left radical underground newspaper published in a tabloid newspaper format and distributed through the underground press network in the US in the years 1969-1970. Fairly serious in content with a focus on radical organizing issues, it was loosely aligned with the SDS movement. The first issue was dated March, 1969, with two editorial offices in New York, where Carol Brightman, Beverly Leman, and Kathy McAfee were listed on the first masthead, later to be joined by a number of others including Marge Piercy and Sol Yurick; and San Francisco, where the collective included Peter Booth Wiley, Carole Deutch, Danny Beagle, Matthew Steen, Bob Gavriner, Al Haber, Bruce Nelson, Todd Gitlin and David Wellman. Part of the inspiration for the paper was a desire to fill the gap created by the demise of the influential New Left organ Studies on the Left, and the core group included people from the antiwar newsletter Viet Report.
WNina was a secret underground printing house in Baku, Russian Empire, established in July 1901 by the Baku Iskraist group, consisting of Lado Ketskhoveli, Leonid Krasin, "Nina" P. Kozerenko, Avel Yenukidze, Semyon Yenukidze, and Lev Halperin. Nina received direct assistance from Lenin and had contacts with the Tbilisi committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
WNOLA Express is a singular publication started in 1967 in New Orleans as part of the Underground Free Press movement of the 1960s that protested the Vietnam War and other government policies along with social hypocrisies. Published by two young poets, Darlene Fife and Robert Head, and produced by a dedicated band of activists, poets and illustrators based in the French Quarter, NOLA Express was opposed to American imperialism, racism and materialism. The paper was named after William S. Burroughs's cut-up novel, Nova Express, and published uncensored news, art and literature featuring Charles Bukowski, Hedwig Gorski, and many others.
WOctobriana is a Russian comic superhero created by Petr Sadecký by modifying the work of Czech artists Bohumil Konečný and Zdeněk Burian for an unpublished comic book series Sadecký commissioned them to do, under the working title of Amazona.
WOmaha Kaleidoscope was a brief-lived countercultural, antiwar underground newspaper published in Omaha, Nebraska in 1971. Edited by Tim Andrews and published monthly in a tabloid format, it was part of the small Kaleidoscope chain of underground newspapers based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The first issue was dated Feb. 10, 1971.
WThe Organ was a US counterculture underground newspaper which produced a total of 9 irregularly published issues in San Francisco in a 36-page folded tabloid format between July 1970 and July 1971. It featured two-color covers, black-and-white interiors and a double-page centerfold poster in each issue, and cost 50 cents. It was published by Christopher Weills and edited by Gerard van der Leun. Contributors included Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Greg Irons, Tom Veitch, Dave Sheridan, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shea, William Burroughs, Michael Rossmann, Richard Lupoff, Sandy Darlington, Howard J. Pearlstein, and Don Donahue. Interviews with a number of countercultural figures appeared, including Kenneth Anger, Jerry Garcia, and Allen Ginsberg.
WOz was an independently published, alternative/underground magazine associated with the international counterculture of the 1960s. While it was first published in Sydney in 1963, a parallel version of Oz was published in London from 1967. The Australian magazine was published until 1969 and the British version until 1973.
WPeace News (PN) is a pacifist magazine first published on 6 June 1936 to serve the peace movement in the United Kingdom. From later in 1936 to April 1961 it was the official paper of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), and from 1990 to 2004 was co-published with War Resisters' International.
WThe Peninsula Observer was an underground newspaper published in Palo Alto, California from July 7, 1967 to November 1969. Co-founded by Barry Greenberg and David Ransom, it was produced by Stanford undergraduate and graduate students opposed to the war in Vietnam, with community members and others. Circulation was about 5000 copies.
WThe Rag was an underground newspaper published in Austin, Texas from 1966–1977. The weekly paper covered political and cultural topics that the conventional press ignored, such as the growing antiwar movement, the sexual revolution, gay liberation, and the drug culture. The Rag encouraged these political constituencies and countercultural communities to coalesce into a significant political force in Austin. As the sixth member of the Underground Press Syndicate and the first underground paper in the South, The Rag helped shape a flourishing national underground press. According to historian and publisher Paul Buhle, The Rag was "one of the first, the most long-lasting and most influential" of the Sixties underground papers. In his 1972 book, The Paper Revolutionaries, Laurence Leamer called The Rag "one of the few legendary undergrounds."
WRebirth was a short-lived hippie underground newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona, which published nine biweekly and weekly issues between May 20, 1968 and August 1969. Published in tabloid format and featuring psychedelic graphics and underground comix, along with coverage of local and national news from a countercultural perspective, Rebirth was linked to the underground radio culture in Phoenix around radio stations KNIX, KRUX and KCAC, which were at the time offering a free-form FM progressive rock format.
WSamisdat debuted as The Berkeley Samisdat Review in June 1973 and over a period of two decades published 244 issues. Samisdat was from the beginning an anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-communist, anti-nuclear power, pro-animal, and pro-vegetarian literary magazine. Over 1000 authors appeared in Samisdat, and for some it was their first appearance in print; some of these authors went on to successful careers as authors or poets.
WSamizdat was a form of dissident activity across the socialist Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, due to the fact that most typewriters and printing devices were inventorized and required permission to access. This grassroots practice to evade official Soviet censorship was fraught with danger, as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials.
WSpace City! was an underground newspaper published in Houston, Texas from June 5, 1969 to August 3, 1972. The founders were Students for a Democratic Society veterans and former members of the staff of the Austin, Texas, underground newspaper, The Rag, one of the earliest and most influential of the Sixties underground papers. The original editorial collective was composed of Thorne Dreyer, who had been the founding "funnel" of The Rag in 1966; Victoria Smith, a former reporter for the St. Paul Dispatch; community organizers Cam Duncan and Sue Mithun Duncan; and radical journalists Dennis Fitzgerald and Judy Gitlin Fitzgerald.