If you’re interested in the undercurrents of American culture in the second half of the 20th century, the JSTOR Independent Voices collection might just be the goldmine you’re looking for. An open-source digital database comprised of 22,000 resources, Independent Voices compiles primary source material from the American alternative press—underground newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and literary journals—primarily (though not exclusively) showcasing materials from the 1960s-1980s. It’s part of a larger project called Reveal Digital that, similar to HathiTrust, forms a digital repository sourced from the special collections of a consortium of research libraries.

Independent Voices is divided into subsections that represent a variety of different cultural communities: African Americans; Native Americans; feminists; the Latino community; the LGBT community; college campus subcultures; the anti-war GI community; the right wing; and the literary underground (via “little magazines,” a term for independently produced documents associated with the literary avant-garde).

On a first glance, these might feel like arbitrary divisions—for example, the gay liberation movement obviously collaborated with campus activists, and the literary underground intersected with all the above identity groups. The subsections of Independent Voices, though, have less to do with identarian representation and more with specific alternative press traditions: for example, the “Latino” category corresponds with presses associated with the Chicano Movement; “feminist” largely corresponds with the second-wave feminist networks that went hand-in-hand with feminist bookstores, and so on.

If you combine appropriate keywords with JSTOR’s built-in search filters, Independent Voices can enable some powerful primary source research—and, unlike many other primary source databases, it allows us to examine specific topics across a variety of divergent alternative press communities.

So, what does this look like in practice? Let’s say you’re writing a paper for an FGSS course, and you’re interested in the rhetoric surrounding abortion in the immediate aftermath of the ratification of Roe v. Wade. We might begin with the following keyword string:
Then, using the filters on the left, we can set the date range from 1973-1974. Next—and this is where the subdivisions of Independent Voices get really useful—we can specify which subcollection(s) we want to search within:

Through some experimentation, I was able to yield some very diverse results: a write-up of a Chicana conference in which abortion was discussed (see p. 6); a narrative description of abortion in a feminist short story (see p. 19); and a sobering response to the Roe v. Wade victory that details the way in which legalized abortion is still mediated by the “agreements, conflicts, and comprises of [patriarchal] institutions” (see p. 6). There’s a lot of breadth here! In this way, we might use Independent Voices to understand how history unfolds outside the mainstream across divergent media forms, modalities, and communities.

If you’re working on an assignment that requires you to use news sources, Independent Voices can also provide more a politically radical perspective than you might encounter in mainstream news databases. For example, suppose we want to research media responses to an event that happened on our own campus, the Willard Straight Takeover. (Hey humanities instructors, there’s a free assignment idea!) In addition to consulting standard news sources, the Daily Sun archives, and Rare and Manuscript Collections, we could use Independent Voices to see how the alternative press responded to the event. By searching “Willard Straight,” I came across the following relevant resources: a detailed account of the event in a radical NYC paper (see p. 3); a Seattle alt-weekly that mentions the event in a more general article about student activism (see p. 4); and an article in the San Francisco-based The Movement that praises the takeover as “brilliant” and “instructive for the entire movement” (see p. 11). That’s a level of sympathy that you’re unlikely to find in most mainstream news sources from 1969!

Independent Voices does have some limitations. Probably the most obvious problem is the inability to filter searches for geographic location—which feels like a strange choice, considering that the individual publication records list “place of publication” in their metadata. Additionally, the database doesn’t provide much information about the physical attributes or technologies used to create the individual periodicals—which is a definite limitation for researchers of print history, especially given that many of the publications archived in the “little magazines” subsection were associated  with the mimeograph revolution. Thus, it would be a good idea to do background research on any of the publications in Independent Voices that you choose to cite. Also, the right-wing section of Independent Voices only contains a handful of publications, and this is a definite limitation if you’re interested in studying, say, right-wing responses to ‘60s counterculture.

If you have questions about Independent Voices, other JSTOR collections, or anything else related to your research, please drop us a line!