This page is a guide to finding serial publications of the non-mainstream media, often referred to as “alternative” or “underground” press publications, which include newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and other types of serial publications. These periodicals tend to be written from an acknowledged political perspective–for example, antiwar–and they often promote a specific agenda. They might, however, report on news that is of interest to a specific community—often a marginalized one—without endorsing any defined ideology. Examples of these might be African American newspapers, gay and lesbian magazines, military newspapers, or publications of immigrant groups. One scholar has defined them as "periodicals aimed at certain minority or dissident groups and usually distributed through irregular channels."1
This guide covers primarily alternative press publications of the United States, with some coverage of Canada and the United Kingdom. African American newspapers are treated in a separate page on this guide.
Alternative newspapers and periodicals are sometimes mistakenly referred to as "underground newspapers." Strictly speaking, an underground publication is one that is published secretly--in other words, the place of publication and identity of the publisher are not disclosed. Most alternative newspapers and periodicals in library collections do not meet this criterion.
Below are the major digital collections that reproduce alternative periodicals. In some cases, these periodicals are embedded in larger collections of mixed document types (for example: The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives).
This link opens in a new windowArticle indexes index the contents of newspapers and periodicals. Historically, periodicals were not digitized, and periodicals were only described in library catalogs with a single record, the record for the periodical itself. Article indexes facilitated the discovery of the actual articles within those periodicals.
Because the Library did not subscribe to every (or even most) alternative periodicals, and because not all alternative periodicals have been digitized, and because not all digitized periodicals are available in a single collection, the article indexes provide the only efficient means of identifying relevant articles from across the widest possible range of periodical publications.
The only article indexes listed in this section are those that are available online, as searchable databases. There are several important article indexes, especially for labor history, that are only available in print, and those are listed in the section Bibliographies, Catalogs, and Guides.
This link opens in a new windowThe University Library has hundreds of newspapers on microfilm, with coverage back to 1960 and earlier. The best way to check for availability of specific titles, or to browse by date and place of publication, is to consult the Library’s Newspaper Database:
You can also search the Newspaper Database for periodicals devoted to a specific subject (for example: feminism, socialism, military, LBGTQ, labor).
Below are listed some of the major microfilm sets:
This link opens in a new windowBizot, Jean-François. Free Press: Underground and Alternative Publications, 1965-1975. Trans. David H. Wilson. New York: Universe Publishing, 2006.
Carpenter, Gerald. “Alternative Press.” The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Eds. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 60-62.
Wachsberger, Ken, ed. Voices from the Underground. Tempe, Ariz.: Mica Press, 1993.
Barlow, Aaron. “The Rise of the Blogosphere: Alternative Journalism.” The Rise of the Blogosphere. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2007.
Cohen, Mitchell. “Decades of Dissent.” Dissent 51, no. 2 (Winter, 2004): 5-8.
Halleck, DeeDee. “Alternative Media in the United States.” Battleground: The Media. Eds. Robin Andersen and Jonathan Gray. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008.
Shore, Elliott. “Decade of Dissent: The Alternative Press in Philadelphia, 1966-1976.” Drexel Library Quarterly 12 (July, 1976): 59-74.
1. Mary Allcorn, The Underground Newspaper Collection of the University of Missouri Libraries (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1992), i.
