Blake Slonecker Collection
An historian of twentieth century social movements, Blake Slonecker received his doctorate at the University of North Carolina in 2009 and joined the history faculty at Waldorf College soon thereafter. In a dissertation examining the utopian impulses of the New Left (published in 2012 as A new dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the long sixties), Slonecker explored how the political and cultural activism of the 1960s helped reshape American political culture in the decade following.
In June 2008, Slonecker conducted oral historical interviews with four individuals who were part of the extended community centered on the Montague Farm and Packer Corners communes during the late 1960s: Tom Fels, Charles Light, Sam Lovejoy, and Richard Wizansky. In wide-ranging interviews, the former communards discuss topics ranging from the fraught politics of the era, political and cultural activism, gender roles and sexuality, and daily life on the communes.
Background on Blake Slonecker
An historian of twentieth century social movements, Blake Slonecker received his doctorate at the University of North Carolina in 2009 and joined the history faculty at Waldorf College soon thereafter. In a dissertation examining the utopian impulses of the New Left, Slonecker explored how the political and cultural activism of the 1960s helped reshape American political culture in the decade following. The center of his narrative was the Liberation News Service, a press agency for the counterculture, as well as a series of associated communes in western Massachusetts and Vermont which Slonecker argues were structured as a “family” on a Thoreauvian ideal of “sincerity, accountability, and equality.” His work on the New Left and the American counterculture has appeared regularly in historical journals, with his first book, A new dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the long sixties, appearing in 2012.
Slonecker has received recognition on several occasions for his outstanding teaching at Waldorf, and he continues to research the intersection of late twentieth-century social movements, including civil rights, student movements, gay and women’s liberation, and pacifism.
The Slonecker collection consists of four substantial oral historical interviews with former members of communes in western Massachusetts and Vermont: Tom Fels, Charles Light, Sam Lovejoy, and Richard Wizansky, all of which informed his book, A new dawn for the New Left. In their wide-ranging interviews, the former communards discuss topics ranging from the fraught politics of the era, political and cultural activism, gender roles and sexuality, and daily life on the communes.
Gift of Blake Slonecker, 2013.
Processed by I. Eliot Wentworth, Feb. 2014.
)Cite as: Blake Slonecker Oral History Collection (MS 795). Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries.