Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Next Meeting: Tuesday, Nov. 27, 5:30 pm

Get involved with Rainbow Bookstore’s Radical Oral History Project and preserve Madison's political history! Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, November 27, at 5:30 pm at Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative (426 W. Gilman).

At this meeting, we'll be looking at a private collection of documents associated with the Madison Tenant Union and having a conversation about how best to digitize, store, and facilitate access to them. People with experience archiving print media are especially encouraged to attend!

NB: a previous version of this post said that the next meeting would be Monday, November 26. This was an error.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will be at 5:30 pm on October 22 at Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative (426 W. Gilman).

Monday, October 1, 2012

Who We Are and What We Do


Madison has been home to a vibrant community of radical activists since at least the 1950s. The stories of their struggles against racism and imperialism and for social justice at home and abroad remain largely unrecorded. It is imperative that we record and store their memories now, so that we can benefit from their collective experience in contemporary struggles. We are activists, and we are motivated to initiate this project by a desire to use lessons learned in the past to improve our activism in the present. Collecting, transcribing, and analyzing the local histories of the left in Madison well help us adapt our efforts, as activists, to the particular dynamics of this city.

We are primarily interested in political organization and movement building. We will seek out individuals who actively participated in radical left organizations, and we want to uncover the role played by such organizations in the development of mass social movements—in particular, the civil rights, organized labor, anti-war movements. The history of the radical left in Madison—and all of the US—has been silenced. Our project will help to restore the radical left to its rightful place as a highly influential force in the social, political, and cultural history of the US.