Collection overview
“There have been student protests in the United States for nearly as long as there have been students.” So write the curators of the Interference Archive’s exhibit Walkout: A Brief History of Student Organizing. Reveal Digital’s Student Activism collection aims to provide access to unique, yet essential, primary sources documenting the deep and broad history of student organizing in the United States.
The collection is intended to serve as a scholarly bridge from the extensive history of student protest in the United States to the study of today’s vibrant, continually unfolding actions. Angus Johnston, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, states, “The activists of the ’60s and ’70s, confronting universities that were hostile to their values and ideals, launched a movement that remade American higher education in their own image — not completely, and perhaps not permanently, but in significant, lasting ways. Today’s activists may yet articulate — and enact — a similarly far-reaching agenda.”
Open access to the collection on JSTOR
The Student Activism collection is Open Access and freely available to everyone who wishes to use it.
Libraries can help their users discover the collection by adding it to A-Z lists and research guides in U.S. History and Sociology. In addition, libraries can activate the collection in the following discovery services: ProQuest Summon, Ex Libris Alma, EBSCO Discovery Service, and OCLC WorldCat Discovery Services.
Explore the full collection on JSTOR
Scope
The completed collection will contain approximately 75,000 pages drawn from special collection libraries and archives around the country. Materials intended for inclusion are wide-ranging in nature: circulars; leaflets; fliers; pamphlets; newsletters; campaign materials; protest literature; clippings; periodicals; bulletins; letters; press releases; ephemera; and meeting, demonstration, conference, and event documentation.
The collection will capture the voices of students across the great range of protest, political actions, and equal-rights advocacy from the 20th and early 21st century United States. The primary sources intended for inclusion will be broad-based across time, geography, and political viewpoint — from the conservative to the anarchist.
In the interest of sensitivity toward the privacy of activists on the streets and in organizing communities today, the collection does not depict contemporary protests.
- Topics and events intended for inclusion
- Anti-apartheid divestiture
- Student involvement in the civil rights movement
- History of Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Young Americans for Freedom
- Columbia University student strike of 1968
- East L.A. student blowout
- Free speech movement
- Indians of All Tribes’ occupation of Alcatraz
- Take-Back-the-Night anti-sexual assault activism
- Vietnam War opposition and demilitarization activism
- Women’s rights
- LGBTQ+ rights
- Orangeburg massacre
- Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel
- Gulf War and Iraq war opposition
- Battle in Seattle (WTO action)
Content contributors
The following libraries have agreed to provide source material. We expect to add many more libraries and archives to this list over the course of the project.
- Bowling Green State University
- Brandeis University
- Civil Rights Movement Archive
- College of William & Mary
- Colorado State University
- Colorado State University, Pueblo
- Densho Digital Repository
- Drew University
- Eastern Michigan University
- Graduate Theological Union
- Temple University Libraries, Special Collections and Research Center
- University of Arkansas
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- University of Connecticut
- University of Maine
- University of Missouri
- University of South Florida
- University of Texas, Arlington
- University of Washington
- West Virginia University
- Yeshiva University
Funding
The costs associated with publishing this important collection have been provided by 61 academic libraries that contributed to the Diversity & Dissent Fund. We are grateful for the participation and support of all the funders and contributors that have made this work possible.
Interested in contributing content?
We are actively approaching a number of libraries for participation, but funding libraries can also contribute some content; ten percent of the collection is being reserved for content provided by those libraries not specifically targeted for inclusion.
Funding libraries are invited to nominate source material from their own collections, from a single document to multiple boxes.