RADICAL AMERICA / Frank Brodhead, Paul Buhle et al (eds.).

RADICAL AMERICA, 1967–1999
Radical America was a product of the campus-based New Left of the late 1960s, specifically the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but the magazine long outlived its seedbed. Its trajectory shows something about the effort to place an intellectual stamp on the radical impulses of the late twentieth century.
The SDS-connected Radical Education Project, formed in 1966, encouraged SDS members to start long-distance study groups that would explore topics relevant to the new radicalism. Paul Buhle, then a US history graduate student at the University of Connecticut, started one that he called American Radical History & Political Thought, exchanging letters with a handful of interested SDS members across the country. After a few months he got their cooperation in a mimeographed “journal” called Radical America, which seemingly exists now (2006) only in memory.
Paul and his wife, historian Mari Jo Buhle, took up residence at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1967. He recruited several members of the local SDS chapter to work on the fledgling journal and made it into a bimonthly, printed by volunteers in a 5½ x 8½ format on a small printing press owned by the Madison SDS chapter. Single copies sold for 50¢; subs were $3, or $2 for SDS national members. The first year’s issues offered a miscellany of articles and documents having to do with the history of American radicalism. A frequent theme, however, was the very recent history of New Left organizing efforts — commentary by participants, as in Peter Wiley’s article “Hazard, Ky.: Failure and Lessons” (Vol. 2 No. 1) or Richard Rothstein’s “ERAP: Evolution of the Organizers” (Vol. 2 No. 2).
In mid-1968, Paul Buhle started to take the magazine in a different direction, emphasizing special themes and farming out some issues to groups of radically minded thinkers in other cities. (It was still produced in Madison, and a shifting group of local people helped with the production.). The first issue to mark the new trend was Vol. 2 No. 4 (July-August 1968), most of it devoted to historical and contemporary articles on Black liberation, laced with poetry and chosen mainly by historian George Rawick. Two issues later, the final 1968 issue (Vol. 2 No. 6), had as its theme “Radicalism and Culture,” again with poetry mingled with the articles.
Nineteen sixty-nine, corresponding to Vol. 3 of RA, reflected the same trends. The January-February issue (No. 1) took the form of a comic book, edited by the underground cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, by far the all-time biggest seller of all RA issues. Other themes that year included working-class history (No. 2), Louis Althusser (No. 5), and youth culture (No. 6). This was the year that SDS split asunder at its July national convention in Chicago, soon marked in RA by the disappearance (in No. 6) of the special subscription rate for “SDS national members.”

Disp.: vol. 4, nº 8/9 (1970); vol. 8, nº 6 (nov.-dic. 1974); vol. 11, nº 1 (ene-feb. 1977).