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SDS Membership Card Contributed By Paul Buhle |
Paul Buhle edited Radical America, an SDS publication that survived the organization's ending in 1969
Paul was active in SDS chapters in Champaign-Urbana, Storrs CT and Madison WI, as well as serving SDS as editor/publisher of RADICAL AMERICA. He is now scripting a comic-format history of SDS for a commercial publisher, with Gary Dumm doing the artwork. Paul will emphasize branch activity (rather than the National Office) and wishes to receive "stories" that can be made into script; stick figures with dialogue if anyone wishes to do that; and suggestions in general.Email: Paul_Buhle@Brown.edu
Browse Radical America Archive
About Radical America
Radical America was a magazine launched in 1967 by radical graduate students in Madison, Wisconsin, with Paul Buhle serving as poetic dynamo until 1973. Its early mimeographed issues bore the inscription "An SDS Journal of the History of American Radicalism", the initials referring to Students for a Democratic Society, the primary organization of 1960s student radicals. Although SDS broke up in 1969, the journal lived on, thriving in the 1970s, surviving the 1980s, but dissolving in the early 1990s. Sixties radicals were often faulted by their elders for anti-intellectualism, but Radical America explored the past with rigor, intelligence, and spirit. Contributors included C. L. R. James, Agnes Heller, E. P. Thompson, Mike Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Staughton Lynd, and Herbert Marcuse. Radical America was versatile and creative, devoting a special issue to comics long before the current vogue of cultural studies, assisting in the emergence of women's and labor history, and in its later phases giving much attention to sexuality, especially gay life.
Brown University Library's digitizing of Radical America is extremely welcome, given the rarity of many issues. The web site makes available PDF files of the first fourteen years's run (a few issues, including the first, are missing, but the site states an intention to digitize all of them). Features include an author list keyed to the issues in which the author's articles appeared, as well as a keyword search mechanism, but the text itself is not searchable, and search results are imperfect. The main value of the website is simply that it makes available entire scanned issues of an extraordinarily rare magazine of cultural criticism, social rebellion, and radical politics. This is the kind of service sure to facilitate the work of students of American culture, dissenting social movements, and intellectual life, as well as anyone curious about America in the 1960s.