Marshall Bloom (AC 1966) Alternative Press Collection

In 1967 Marshall Bloom (AC 1966) co-founded, with Raymond Mungo of Boston University, a news organization, first called Resistance Press Service, whose purpose was to deliver feature stories and news to the "underground" press, student press, radio stations and independent weekly newspapers and magazines as an alternative to established news services such as Associated Press (AP) and Collegiate Press Service (CPS). The name of the organization was soon changed to Liberation News Service (LNS). LNS achieved initial success and became firmly established after the October 1967 anti-Vietnam War protests at the Pentagon in Washington by reporting on aspects of the antiwar movement that had been ignored or misunderstood by mainstream media. The organization sent out inexpensively produced offset-printed "packets" to its subscribers several times a week. First based in Washington, D.C., where it received financial assistance from the Institute for Policy Studies, it moved to New York City, near Columbia University, in 1968. After an internal division within LNS, Bloom and a group of his associates moved operations to a farm in rural Montague, Massachusetts. This "branch" of LNS seems to have ceased with issue #120, January 1969, while issues from New York City continued to be produced through 1981. Marshall Bloom died in 1969.

LNS eventually served as many as 400 subscribers throughout North America and Europe. The collection accrued through an agreement whereby LNS subscribers submitted one copy of every issue in which LNS stories were published. After being acquired by Amherst College, the collection has grown through the acquisition of additional titles from various sources.