(To learn why we organize the FSM's history this way, see the Introduction.)

Administrative Pressures and Student Political Activity at Berkeley

(The New Left at Berkeley)

APSPAB: A Summary Essay

This dry introduction summarized the findings of our collective research, with extensive footnotes to the published documents. In reviewing the variety of ways in which the administration had interfered with students' political activity, it described a pattern of repression of political expression, that amounted to repression of an emerging movement. It also reviewed the pattern of administrative resistance to changing this relation; and recognized both patterns in the beginning of the Fall 1964 conflict.

APSPAB: The Published Report

Working in crisis, we undertook many supporting studies, but were able to publish only twenty-three of those we managed to complete. This link opens to the report's table of contents -- a page listing the published studies, with its brief, original introduction. Their texts will be accessible from that page, and from the more comprehensive links below.

APSPAB: The Working Papers

This link opens to an alphabetical index of the reports generated by the project, and an inventory of its editorial and logistical papers. Some 73 reports were prepared, on a wide variety of topics covering nearly the whole range of development of the New Left at Berkeley, as well as its conflict with the administration.

In quality, they ranged from sketchy summaries of newspaper coverage to dense, invaluable interview; from naive transcription of source accounts to competent analytic histories. At this distance, two-thirds seem of value still, as original materials offering more detail than is found in published accounts, and/or as convenient summaries or guides to scattered published detail. Their index is itself a working paper, and as yet includes no advisory notes about the reports it lists. Though accessible from this index, their texts may be accessed more conveniently through the link below.

The Prehistory of the FSM: The New Left at Berkeley

This link opens to a thematic index of the project's reports, extended and organized to cover the full range of the New Left's development at Berkeley through 1964. To complement the project's reports on each theme, this index will offer references and links to other source material and interpretations. Through such means, we hope to bring the complex substance of a richly-pregnant history into coherent view. Such an undertaking is necessarily collective, and here hardly begun; we will welcome help from those who recognize what might contribute to it or advance it.

The documents related to each theme may be accessed directly from the list below:

Academic freedom
Alternative media
Anti-Communism
Anti-war activism
Civil liberties issues and activism
Civil Rights activism
Educational reform
Electoral politics and activism
Environmental activism
Farm labor activism
Faculty governance and activism
Gender issues
Governmental surveillance (FBI, etc.)
Graduate student organizing
International solidarity (Cuba, Vietnam)
Marxist activism
Mass media coverage
Prisioner activism (capital punishment)
Religious groups and student activism
Sexual and "obscenity" activism
SLATE (umbrella of the student movement)
Student activists (studies)
Student government (ASUC)
Student newspaper (The Daily Californian)
Union-related activism
University administration

For each theme, the story continues through the Fall of 1964 and well beyond, in suites of documents extending these, organized in the index "What Followed from the FSM?"

This page last changed 20 March, 2002
URL: http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/covers/political-hist2_cvr.html