EXPLORE THE DEVELOPMENT, ACTIONS AND IDEOLOGIES BEHIND TWENTIETH CENTURY EXTREMISM AND RADICALISM

As one of the first digital archives on far-right and far-left political groups, Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right and Left Political Groups in the U.S., Europe, and Australia in the Twentieth Century contains over 600,000 pages of content and 42 oral histories making it the most extensive resource of its kind.  Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right and Left Political Groups in the U.S., Europe, and Australia in the Twentieth Century offers researchers a diverse range of content, including campaign materials, propaganda, government records, and various ephemera that when combined with the Gale Primary Sources technology, enable researchers to explore extremism and radicalism in new and innovative ways. 

A deeper look at the sub-collections:

Since 1970, the American Radicalism Collection at Michigan State University has been collecting ephemera on radical political groups, across a range of extremist movements including those involved in religion, race, gender, the environment, and equal rights. The collection covers four general categories , each with a different focus: leftist politics and anti-war movements; religion and the radical right; race, gender and equal rights; and social, economic and environmental movements. The collection also includes materials on such topics as survivalism, Holocaust denial, creationism, and anti-Catholicism from groups like John Birch Society and the Black Panther Party. 

The Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda, from Brown University, includes printed propaganda from US anti-integrationist, anti-Semitic and racist groups from the post-World War II period to the present. The collection began when Gordon Hall, a young veteran of the Pacific Theatre during the war, first encountered the printed propaganda issued by domestic hate-your-neighbor organizations/groups in the late 1940's. Includes publications of Anti-Abortion organizations; Anti-Integrationist organizations; Anti-Semitic and Racist political parties; Christian Identity organizations; Communist organizations;  Congressional investigating committees; Cults and Alternative religions; Extreme Left-Wing publishers; Ku Klux Klan organizations; LaRouche organizations; Militant Anti-Communist organizations; Militant Populist organizations; Neo-Nazi organizations; Pacifist organizations; Racial and Ethnic Consciousness organizations; Right-Wing Christian religious organizations; and Right-Wing publishers. 

The Searchlight Archive, held at the University of Northampton in the UK, consists of documents from Searchlight Associates, an information service founded in 1967 that aimed to expose racist and fascist groups. In 1975 it launched a magazine, 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.  The interviews are available within the platform both as audio recordings as well as searchable transcripts. This archive also includes various ephemera including booklets, leaflets and posters.

Working with the National Archives in the UK, Gale has digitized government documents relating to inter- and post-war British extremist movements. These include Security Service personal files on right-wing extremists, suspected communists and terrorists as well as Home Office papers on detainees, such as Oswald Mosley, who were related to far-right groups including the British Union of Fascists, British National Party, Imperial Fascist League, the Nordic League and The Link.