Political Extremism & Radicalism in the Twentieth Century: Far-Right and Left Political Groups in the U.S., Europe, and Australia

This database includes difficult to find ephemera and internal documents for the predecessors of today’s Alt-Right and Antifa.  Sourced from the Hall-Hoag collection at Brown University, the American Radicalism collection at Michigan State and the British National Archives, it includes coverage of right wing and leftist organizations, people and themes there were considered ‘extreme’ at the time the material was collected: SDS, Black Panther Party, Libertarians, Socialists, John Birch Society, Fascists, Gay Liberation Movement, etc.

Access is also provided to the archive and magazine of Searchlight Associates, an information service founded in 1967 that aimed to expose racist and fascist groups. In 1975 it started publishing Searchlight, intended to promote intelligence on the far-right from around the world. This archive includes oral histories from activists who acted as undercover informants on far-right organisations or members of anti-fascist groups.

Although materials produced by some of the organizations are disturbing on multiple levels, access to this material is essential to understanding bigoted, xenophobic and similar views that have always existed in some form and continue to be expressed today.  The material also describes counter-narratives to mainstream information sources that historically were often unnoticed but eventually led to notions of ‘fake news’ and to Alt-Right communication channels on the Internet.