As the United States entered the nineteenth century, the highly skilled artisans who worked in their own homes to create customized items for individual patrons were replaced by large-scale operations in which unskilled workers produced identical units in quantity and at lower cost. Rarely did these laborers ever meet the men and women who ultimately purchased their goods. A single cobbler no longer made the entire shoe; in his place was a series of faceless workers, each completing one discrete function. By the mid-1820s, not only shoes but also such items as furniture, carriages, rope, barrels, brushes, cigars, hats, and...

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, economic factors related to the issue of slavery developed to create a geographic fault line that divided the United States into two distinct sections. The North began to industrialize, with the rapid growth of urban-based factories producing a broad range of consumer products; the South retained its largely agrarian economy that relied on the production of cotton and tobacco, both of which rested squarely on the back of slave labor.

To the religious zealots at the vanguard of the Abolition Movement, even more important than the economic dimension of slavery was the...

The American woman of the nineteenth century was widely perceived to be incapable of rational thinking—resolutely helpless and inferior to her male counterpart. She was thought to require man’s protection and was, in legal terms, under the guardianship of her father, then her husband. No woman was allowed to vote, and a married woman was not permitted to own property because she was not considered an independent citizen but an appendage who assumed her place in society based on her husband’s identity and her biological ability to reproduce the species. She married at sixteen and gave birth to a...

The three earliest genres of the American dissident press crusaded on behalf of very different causes—labor rights, the abolition of slavery, and women’s rights—and were spread over a time span of almost half a century—from William Heighton founding the Mechanic’s Free Press in 1828 to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Brownell Anthony selling The Revolution in 1870. Despite these distinctions, the first generation of dissident publications not only shared several common traits but also established themes that would continue to define the journalistic “voices of revolution” for the next two centuries.

Factory workers, slaves, and women were...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other feminists who raised their dissident voices in The Revolution had, in the late 1860s, begun to question the sanctity of the vows that permanently bound a wife to her husband. They challenged the concept of a woman finding her identity solely through the man she married, often when she was little more than an adolescent, and pointed out that too often a husband ended up not being his wife’s protector—but her abuser. Stanton went so far as to advocate that in cases of domestic violence, often the only viable solution was divorce.

In the...

With the collapse of Reconstruction and the departure of federal troops from the former Confederacy, the defeated and demoralized South devised a new means, beginning in the 1870s, to maintain economic and political control over former slaves.

Lynching black men had the short-term purpose of terrifying and intimidating former slaves so they would remain docile and the long-term purpose of perpetuating the feudal system that reigned throughout the South. To rationalize the barbaric act, southern racists contrived the black man’s mythical lust for the white woman. During the final two decades of the nineteenth century, lynching claimed the lives of...

The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new genre of the dissident press created to drive a stake into the heart of what its founders considered a pernicious threat to the world’s greatest democracy: capitalism.

According to these publications, the Industrial Revolution had elevated the lust for financial gain into the most powerful force in American life. This pervasive greed had, in fact, become so strong that it had spawned an elite class of economic aristocrats who wielded unlimited control and absolute authority on the scale of medieval kings. These robber barons—men such as Andrew...

Of the many social movements that have helped shape this nation, none has been more misunderstood than the one advocating anarchism. Despite the widespread connotation that this concept is supported only by wild-eyed and demented monsters whose single goal is to destroy civilized society, the men and women who introduced the anarchist philosophy to America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, in fact, committed and courageous defenders of the poor and the powerless.

Following an ideology much like that of the Founding Fathers, the anarchists shared a unifying belief in the absolute supremacy of individual liberty. A...

The genres of the dissident press that emerged during the final years of the nineteenth century suggest several more overarching characteristics that apply to many of the publications that were “voices of revolution.” Some of the traits evolved from themes that originated in dissident voices that were published earlier in the century, and others had been at least hinted at by that first generation—and then came into full bloom during the second.

Because the radical nature of the causes that dissident publications champion often denies them the advertising and circulation revenue that sustains mainstream media, editors sometimes experiment with...

Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the vast majority of black Americans remained second-class citizens. Ninety percent of them lived in the South, prohibited from voting or holding public office and denied political and economic control over their own lives. Most black men and women worked from dawn to dusk as field hands, paid whatever paltry sum their white employers chose to give them. Enduring a virtual feudal system in which even the most basic of human rights did not exist, women and girls were forced into sexual servitude by white overlords who kept black men demoralized...

In the early years of the twentieth century, most abortions were not only illegal but also extremely dangerous, as they often were performed by unlicensed “doctors” under unsafe and unsanitary conditions. But giving birth to numerous children was also a concern because of the physical toll that multiple pregnancies took on the mother and the fact that many parents—especially immigrants who worked in low-paying jobs—could not afford to feed and clothe a large number of children. And yet, despite the dual problems with abortions and unrestricted childbirth, for a woman to prevent herself from becoming pregnant was considered...

Although the generation of dissident publications that emerged during the early years of the twentieth century consisted of only two genres, that small contingent nevertheless added several more intriguing items to the list of overarching characteristics that define the “voices of revolution.”

An editor of a nineteenth-century publication occasionally broke societal taboos—Moses Harman orchestrating the “free marriage” of his sixteen-year-old daughter to his thirty-seven-year-old co-editor of Lucifer, the Light-Bearer comes to mind. During the early 1900s, however, such maverick practices moved toward becoming the rule rather than the exception. Both of the journalists who led the dissident press boldly...

The self-assurance won so dearly by the victory in World War II began to fade from the American consciousness during the late 1940s, replaced by fear and anxiety. The pervasive Cold War mentality took hold as Eastern Europe came under the grip of communism and the Soviet Union flexed its muscles by detonating an atomic bomb. The most disturbing event of all was the fall of China in 1949. For despite huge infusions of American aid, the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek withdrew to the island of Taiwan, sacrificing mainland China to communist leader Mao Zedong. A few months later,...

The Vietnam War was by no means the only force challenging the established order during the 1960s. Race, gender, class, personal freedom, the work ethic, recreational drugs, the nature of consciousness—they were all on the table as social turbulence fueled a zeal for self-expression, a disdain for authority, and a mistrust of conventional wisdom that came crashing together to form the Counterculture Movement.

Some of the young rebels belonged to organizations, such as the Students for a Democratic Society, that sought to build a New Left constructed on a desire for fairer, more equitable political relationships in the larger...

Although J. Edgar Hoover and his agents-turned-domestic-terrorists disliked every aspect of the Counterculture Movement, at the very top of their list were the Black Panthers. Like many white Americans, the FBI director and his lieutenants saw the young black men—with their leather jackets and military berets, their clenched jaws and the guns gripped tight in their fists as they marched defiantly through city streets—as the most dangerous element in society, destined to destroy everything that was good about America. The Panthers represented “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” Hoover said in 1969, and directed...

The Counterculture Movement helped lay the groundwork for gay men and lesbians to demand equal rights. With the liberated attitude toward free love and sexual exploration celebrating male-to-male and female-to-female sexual activity as never before, the time clearly had arrived for homosexuals to come out of the closet and march boldly to center stage.

Gay people have never been content to follow meekly in the paths of others, however, so it took their own seismic event to ignite a true social revolution, and then their own dissident press to transform that historic moment into a full-fledged social movement. The event...

Although members of both sexes actively participated in the social movements that erupted during the tumultuous 1960s, none of those various efforts placed a high priority on securing equal rights for American women. In fact, the men who opposed the Vietnam War, created a counterculture, and fought racial oppression were every bit as sexist as other men. Gay males were somewhat more sensitive to women’s concerns—but not enough so to satisfy many feminists. “We have met the enemy and he’s our friend,” a female staff member wrote in one counterculture paper. “And that’s what I want to write about...

The fourth generation of the dissident press bulged with five genres dedicated to effecting social change, each with a discrete mission and yet all of them somewhat overlapping as well. Even though these “voices of revolution” followed the well-worn path that their predecessors had been traversing for a century and a half, they nevertheless illuminated several more overarching commonalities relevant to this unique form of American journalism.

The labor papers that launched dissident journalism in the United States in the 1820s—the Mechanic’s Free Press, Free Enquirer, and Working Man’s Advocate—reflected the concerns of an awakened working class during...

The phenomenon of creating a dissident press to effect social change that William Heighton pioneered when he created the first labor newspaper in 1828 did not cease after feminists published their women’s liberation newspapers in the 1970s. Throughout the final years of the twentieth century and the early ones of the twenty-first, social and political insurgents have continued to define their own brand of journalism. From a historian’s perspective, though, sufficient time has not yet elapsed to gauge, with any degree of certainty, the long-term impact of the dissident publications that have appeared during the last thirty years.

And yet,...