Abstract
PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements, a collaborative digitization project of the libraries and special collections departments of Florida Atlantic University (FAU), and the University of Central Florida (UCF), is composed of materials focusing on a wide range of political and rights issues and social movements including topics such as socialism and communism, class struggle, Marxist economics, religion, world pacifism, anti-racism, anti-Semitism, civil rights, women's rights, workers' rights, world labor movements, world economics, capitalism, the demise of colonialism, Cuban politics, the "ban-the-bomb" movement, war efforts, the Vietnam War, and the United Nations. Spanning from the mid 19th century to the late 20th century, the pamphlets and monographs provide insight into the prevailing leftist and liberal views of the times from countries all around the world; from the United States to Korea and India to Canada.
We invite you to explore the various writings to gain an understanding of historical economic, political, and social forces that have had an influence on today's societies.
Socialist series in the Pamphlet Collection, FAU Libraries Special Collection and Archives Department:
The Socialist Series in the pamphlet collection at FAU Libraries includes over 1,000 late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pamphlets published by a wide variety of socialist and communist groups and their critics, both here and abroad. The pamphlets were among the book stock purchased as the library's opening day collection by FAU in the early 1960s from New York publisher and book dealer Burt Franklin. Publication dates run from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Many of the pamphlets are either scarce or fragile, and cannot be handled. Topics discussed in the pamphlets include issues of workers' rights, race and gender, religion, world economics, capitalism, the demise of colonialism, and the emergence of trade unionism. The collection includes publications of the nascent labor union movement, as well as those of its detractors. The pamphlet collections offer a focused perspective on the thinking prevalent in the days leading up to World Wars I and II, the impact of the war efforts on general populations, and economic and social recovery.
Van Sickle Leftist Pamphlet Collection, UCF Libraries Special Collections and University Archives:
The Van Sickle Leftist Pamphlet Collection consists of over 2,500 communist and socialist writings which range in date from the late 1800's to 1993. The UCF Libraries' Special Collections department acquired the collection in 1980 from the Van Sickle Estate. Miss Van Sickle, was a staunch Canadian Socialist who collected the pamphlets from the 1920s through the 1970s. The original collection contained over 15,000 items, including over 7,000 books, which were catalogued and placed in general circulation, and about 2,500 pamphlets that were placed in Special Collections, available for in-house use only, and most of them were cataloged at the time.
However, the Van Sickle Leftist Pamphlet Collection is a collection of over 400 hundred uncataloged pamphlets. Most of these pamphlets were distributed for free or at a very low cost and were largely propaganda tracts. Many of the items in the collection are very rare, and it is believed that many titles are unique to the UCF collection. The poor quality of the paper used in the printing of the pamphlets, as well as the temporal nature of pamphlet materials, has contributed to their scarcity. Digitization provides a means to lend the item by distributing a copy without risk of loss or damage to the original. Therefore, it broadens the access to this very important material, and at the same time, it addresses preservation, to ensure longevity of this fragile material.
These pamphlets range in date from 1900 to 1993, but are mostly from the 1920s through the 1970s, and cover a variety of topics related not only to communism and socialism but also include world pacifism and the banning of the atomic bomb, anti-racism, anti-Semitism, world labor movements, class struggle, women's rights, Marxist economics, religion, civil rights, the Vietnam War, and the United Nations. The pamphlets also cover a wide geographic range of much of Europe, Cuba, Kenya, the Congo, India, Vietnam and Korea; however, they are concentrated on the United States, Soviet Union and Canada. Many of the authors of these pamphlets are the communist parties of these nations; however, pamphlets are also authored by such figures as Josef Stalin, Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin and Fidel Castro.
