Library online resource Independent Voices offers access to alternative press

The UVA Library presents Independent Voices, an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines, and journals. Funded by donors and libraries, the database is a work-in-progress, constantly expanding to include new special collections material from academic institutions across the country—publications by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, and LGBT activists. Extreme right wing as well as left wing publications are represented. Currently, there are 15,401 issues available, 465,191 pages of journalism that scholars can search by keyword, by library, or browse by title or date.

Participating libraries receive complimentary scans of material sourced from them, with related metadata. Currently, UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library tops the alphabetical list of contributors. The list will be updated automatically as more content is added.

Clicking the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections link reveals a single issue of an obscure underground publication, Sour Grapes, 1 July 1974, historically important because it contains information on kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst who was abducted by a radical group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), in February of 1974. In July, Hearst, who announced she had joined the group, was on the run in Los Angeles with two members. They had separated from six others who died in a gun battle with police and in the ensuing fire in a Los Angeles neighborhood.

photo (upper left) of Patty Hearst and the text of a letter to her parents explaining why she joined with her abductors, the radical "Symbianese Liberation Army.more of Patty Hearst's letter explaining her radicalization, under a picture of her posing with a gun

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