User Guide
Intro
This site is a curated digital archive of punk flyers, zines, and underground publications from the 1980s and early 1990s during Reagan and Bush’s presidential administrations. The collection is organized through structured metadata that allows these materials to be explored not only as individual artifacts, but as part of a broader system of cultural and political communication across scenes, formats, years, and locations.
How to Navigate the Site
Browse
Explore the full collection of items in this tab and search for specific items from Cornell’s archival collections of punk ephemera. Identify recurring themes across flyers, zines, and underground publications through the search bar.
Subjects / Locations
Navigate materials through subject and geographic location tags. Follow connections between themes like political activism, DIY publishing, and live music scenes. Trace how similar subjects appear across different cities and communities, or similar cities feature diverse subjects.
Map
Explore items based on where events originally took place via coordinates. See how punk scenes were distributed across regions and collection creators collected from across the country. Understand how ideas and aesthetics circulated between locations.
Timeline
View materials chronologically across the late twentieth century. Track shifts in design, tone, and political focus over the time dimension. Situate artifacts within broader historical contexts.
About
Learn about the scope of the collection and how it was created. Understand how metadata and digital tools structure the archive. Read the project’s interpretation of punk ephemera as a network of cultural and political expression.