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What's New at the Digger Archives

Announcements of
     Changes,
          Additions, 
               Amendations,
                     Emendations, &c.
27 Sep 2024 Added an interview of Peter Berg by David Zane Mairowitz from 2007 to the Oral History collection.
26 Sep 2024 Added a transcription of Rob Young's eulogy at Peter Berg's memorial in 2011 to the archvist's blog.
11 Jun 2024 Discovered a photo in the collection depicting a storefront wall in the Haight in 1968 with Digger and Free City graffiti, including an original 1% Free poster pasted up. Added this to the Deciphering 1% Free page.
9 Mar 2024 Added a new page with the interview of Lenore Kandel that Alice and Céline conducted in 1998. Many thanks to Jay Babcock for his transcription and editing assistance.
27 Jan 2024 Added a new page, Deciphering 1% Free.
21 Jan 2024 Added a new page with an interview of Arthur Lisch.
18 Dec 2023 Finished the new page for the Illustrated & Annotated Catalog of the Free Print Shop.
15 Dec 2023 Finished the new page for the Free Print Shop publications.
2 Dec 2023 Finished adding the new page for the Free City miscellaneous street sheets.
1 Dec 2023 Finished redesigning the page with the complete set of Free City News sheets with 600-dpi resolution scans.
23 Nov 2023 The Free City News section is being updated with 600-dpi resolution scans. First done: the Free City Set 1 and Free City Set 2).
26 Sept 2023 A new page for a history talk from this past weekend: "Kaliflower & the Homosexual Revolution of 1969." The gay liberation movement in San Francisco in part was influenced by the Diggers and so the history of this cross-over influence is long overdue for recognition.
16 July 2023 It's always a shock to find pages from the Digger web that have disappeared over the years. Today I found the page devoted to Steve Boyd and put it back up. For anyone who hasn't read The Final Word: Last Posts of Steven Robert Boyd on the Digger Forum Guestbook, February—October, 2004 — you're in for a treat.
6 June 2023 Wrote a blog posting about Fred Moore and his importance both for the story of Digger Bread, and also his influence on the computer revolution with his 1974 manifesto "Put Your Trust in People, Not Money."
11 May 2023 Added a reference to the Dutch Provos (with a link to an excellent archive) on the Links page under the Anarchist Movement section.
25 Apr 2023 Added a transcription of a 1973 interview with Linn House and Ivory Waterworth. Added the last half of the 1982 interview with Judy Goldhaft and Peter Berg. [Phew! 50 years in the making for the former; 40 years in the making for the latter.]
5 Apr 2023 Added a new section: Digger Traces with links to other historical sites that have archived the SF Diggers, including Jay Babcock's Diggers Docs, LisaRuth Elliot and Chris Carlsson's Found SF archive, and Chuck Gould's Digger Family Album.
1 Mar 2023 Added a new section: A Brief History of the San Francisco Diggers (and the movement they spawned) with text and images.
13 Feb 2023 Redesigned the Early Digger Papers page and added a long-missing one to the sequence. Eventually this page will be part of a whole new section, Digger Literature, that will present the rich and deep continuum of Digger tracts, manifestos, announcements, and compilations.
15 Sep 2022 Updated the index of BATA videos to include a newly digitized film clip from Dec. 2, 1966 of the first Digger Free Store on Page Street and an interview (very rare indeed) of Billy Murcott.
9 Sep 2022 Added an index of videos from the Bay Area Television Archive of TV news broadcasts that contain interviews of Diggers (&c.) during the heyday of the Haight-Ashbury.
1 Sep 2022 Finished the final (for now) Gedney page: "Gedney Gallery 5" (Notebooks and Writings).
14 Aug 2022 Finished "Gedney Gallery 4" (Be-In, Artists Liberation Front, Oracle offices, Mime Troupe in the park).
11 Aug 2022 Added a page for "Gedney Gallery 3" (street scenes, Tracy's Donut Shop, Psychedelic Shop "Love Book Bust" protest, Pemabo Peace Garden).
10 Aug 2022 Added a page for "Gedney Gallery 2" (inside a Digger pad, photos from Nov 1966).
9 Aug 2022 Added a new page for "Gedney Gallery 1" (early Digger photographs, Free Frame of Reference).
5 Aug 2022 Updated the Gedney Photography page with a new batch of high-resolution photos that he shot of the early Digger Feeds in November 1966.
4 May 2022 Filled out the section that talks about the collaboration between the Diggers and the Black Panthers with excerpts from David Hilliard's autobiography that credit the Diggers for the inspiration behind the Panthers' Free Food and Breakfast for Children programs.
11 Apr 2022 Added an article from 1967, "Hearts Full for Black Free Store," to the Black People's Free Store page.
13 Jan 2022 Salvaged the Chrono Notes page that had become orphaned over the years. It now is back in its rightful place, under History / Chronology.
30 Dec 2021 Added a new page for the 1968 documentary film, Revolution.
20 Jul 2021 Added photos of the Olompali Free Bakery to David Simpson's tale of its founding.
17 Jun 2021 Fixed some typos and added an introduction to Alex Forman's article: "San Francisco style: the diggers and the love revolution" (Anarchy 77).
6 Mar 2021 Ángel Martinez sent an article he wrote about God's Eye Bakery, the Digger free whole wheat bread baking operation at Resurrection City in Washington, DC in 1968. Resurrection City was the final campaign organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. before his assassination on April 4, 1968. Ángel's account is an important historical contribution showing the cross-over between disparate social movements. In this case, the impact of the Digger vision of autonomous mutual support within an economic justice movment.
8 Feb 2021 Ronnie Davis resurrected two interviews he conducted with the defendants in the trial of the Chicago 8 in response to the Netflix release of The Trial of the Chicago Seven written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Ronnie wanted to correct the muted impression that Sorkin left of the radical nature of the trial's defense in its indictment of the US Government's genocidal wars in South-East Asia. Ronnie offered to let the Digger Archives host these interviews and an article he wrote to accompany them. The new page is under the SF Mime Troupe section: Conspiracy 8: R.G. Davis Interviews the Chicago Seven.
10 Dec 2020 On the advice of computer expert David Parkhurst, I used DVDFab to convert the DVD of NOWSREAL that Kelly Hart had sent me which he suggested was a better transfer from the original 16-mm film. And indeed it is. Check out the new video of NOWSREAL the film. Thanks to Dave and Kelly. Pandemic times, useful projects.
9 Nov 2020 Added David Simpson's "Remembrance of Olompali" on the Digger Bread/Free Bakery page. David was prompted to pen this after I posted a copy of a photo of a
Free Bread baking session at the Rancho Olompali commune from 1968. Any and all memoirists should feel free to contribute likeminded accounts herewith.
3 Oct 2020 Added a new page to help visitors NAVIGATE the Digger Archives website. Thanks to Tree for mentioning this. It's been something I've heard before. Hopefully the tips in this new page will help people understand the underlying STRUCTURE of the web pages here and that will help them navigate through the site.
1 Oct 2020 Added Herodotus to the Praxis section of the Hxstory page joining Thucydides and Serendipity.
28 Sep 2020 Added a new item to the Selections from Kaliflower page: "Interrogation of a Businessman by the Interior Police" which will be of special interest to historians of the Beat Era.
28 Sep 2020 Added a new section of the LINKS page for Beat Foundations. Coming soon: BIG REVEAL. The Beat foundations of the Digger movement. Also added: Important Stuff to NOTE for anyone who finds missing links on this page (and this site in general).
8 Aug 2020 Added a "redirect" page for "Peking On Acid" on the Angels of Light section. For future reference, this is the HTML code for redirects: [ <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; url='https://diggers.org/ic_free_carnival_1972.htm'"/> ]
8 Aug 2020 Added a long-overdue link to the "Oral History" page for Jay Babcock's Digger interviews on his "Diggers Docs" blog.
24 Jun 2020 A reader pointed out a broken link on the Levellers: a chronology and bibliography page and it turned out to be a page that never was put back into the Frontpage Navigation structure. Fixed the broken link and the navigation tree.
10 Jun 2020 Fixed numerous transcription errors in the manifesto Deep Tried Frees.
29 Apr 2020 Added a gallery of the restored printouts that were printed and distributed at the The Invisible Circus by the John Dillinger Computer Instant News Service.
27 Apr 2020 Added a slide show for a presentation I gave in 2017 on the 50th Anniversary of The Invisible Circus.
9 Jan 2020 Began a new section to tell the story of the Cockettes (and updating the page for the Angels of Light Free Theater commune).
3 Oct 2019 Updated a page that was lost in one of the server crashes years ago. Diggerly Do: "Life Acting" and "Create the Condition You Describe"
3 Jul 2019 Uploaded my new paper that discusses "Overlooked Sources" on the impact of the Sixties counterculture on world history.
19 Jun 2019 Destiny Kinal has just contributed nine cassette tapes containing interviews she conducted in the 1980s of Digger women. I will be able to transfer these into digital audio files and run them through Temi.com, the machine transcription service. But the one thing I find most difficult with interviewing is close transcription. Are there any volunteers for this worthy historical task? Please contact: curator@diggers.org if you'd like to help out. (The women interviewed included: Lenore Kandel, Jane Lapiner, Kathleen Nolan, Joanna Rinaldi, Eileen Ewing, and Marcia Thelin.) And a BIG THANK YOU to Destiny! (Any and all archival contributions are most welcome at the Digger Archives.)
16 Apr 2019 And just like that, the universe fills a void. Peter Coyote sent a collection of photos for a new Digger Photo Gallery.
13 Apr 2019 At Chuck Gould's request, we have removed his photo galleries. Chuck will be sending updated info about future access to his Digger Family photos.
8 Apr 2019 With Joseph's help, finally got to photograph the large Digger posters in the collection. First up, a new page for the series of Planetedge Posters that were produced in 1969.
3 Apr 2019 Added two items to the NOWSREAL page: a KPIX news broadcast of the May 7 1968 Free City Rally on City Hall Steps at which Ron Thelin was busted for wearing a mask; and, the SF Chronicle front-page article about same.
18 Jan 2019 Thanks to my friend Frank, I learned that a copy of Mother Earth News, vol. 1, no. 1 (Jan 1970) was available on a local for-sale board and I added it to the collection for the Digger Bread recipe it contained. It is now part of the Digger Bread & Free Bakery(ies) page.
21 Dec 2018 Discovered a film review of Berkeley in the Sixties that R. G. Davis wrote in 1990 and which was published in Film Quarterly. With Ronnie's permission, I have posted it on that page here.
6 Sep 2018 Kelly Hart has sent his written recollection of the "genesis of Nowsreal," which is now included on the film's page. Wonderful remembrance.
14 July 2018 Henry Rasof donated his collection of Communication Company &tc. sheets to the Digger Archives. A special page acknowledges and presents his collection. There is also an addendum with information on The Orkustra, the band whose members included Henry, and their connection to the Diggers.
29 May 2018 Put the Morningstar & Wheeler's Free Land pages back into the navigation structure. They had dropped out when the site lost its MS server extensions. Thanks to Ramon for the inspiration to fix this. en
9 Feb 2018 Fixed the Digger Songs page. Sorry about that. Both audio files were "autoplaying" on entry into the English Digger section. Now, only the Billy Bragg tune plays. Both songs have their audio controls adjacent to each other, with links to the lyrics.
25 Jan 2018 Thanks to Kelly Hart's suggestion, the "Photo and Video" page now includes videos. The listing of videos had ended up on the "Highlights" page but now is duplicated here.
11 Jan 2018 Finished updating the Digger Bread (Free Bakeries) page with lots more content, including photos and clippings.
5 Jan 2018 Added an article from the Kansas City underground paper The Screw about a new Free Store (Aug 1 1969).
4 Jan 2018 Added a new page in the Free Store section: "Free Store Ideology (as expounded by an itinerant visitor)" [reproducing a 1967 column by Jeff Berner]
3 Jan 2018 Added a video clip of an interview of R. G. Davis in 1967 in which he discusses his "Guerrilla Theatre" essay.
3 Jan 2018 Added a page for the Black People's Free Store which includes some of the best explanations of the free store concept ever written.
7 Dec 2017 Added the film The Maze, a short (25 min) film produced by KPIX-TV in 1967 which features Michael McClure leading a tour of the Haight-Ashbury (before the deluge).
3 Aug 2017 Added an English-language version of "Les Diggers de San Francisco," the film by Céline Deransart and Alice Gaillard.
2 Aug 2017 Added captions (provided by R.G. Davis)  to the frame shots from the film "Have You Heard of the San Francisco Mime Troupe?"
29 July 2017 Added a gallery of frame shots from the Digger/Free City film Nowsreal and included an introduction. Also, the streaming video is now a higher resolution (2k) video format.
17 July 2017 Added a page in the history section to highlight the SF Mime Troupe and the film Have You Heard of the San Francisco Mime Troupe? which Ronnie Davis has given permission for the Digger Archives to include here.
13 July 2017 Added a page for the 1972 Inter-Communal Free Carnival.
6 July 2017 Added a page about the Free City Bank.
26 Jun 2017 Added a page with the Diggers video clip from the recent NBC Bay Area documentary on the Summer of Love.
14 Jun 2017 Updated the Virtual Free Store database ASP/SQL programming.
13 Jun 2017 Updated the Mutants Commune page to include heading levels on the text for enhanced readability.
18 Apr 2017 Posted one of the videos that Loren Sears made available to the Digger Archives. Pacific Lake is a compilation of the video postcards produced by the Tribal Vision Network in the early 1970s.
4 Mar 2017 Corrected an overlooked lapse of consciousness and restored the page for R.G. Davis' 1966 ground-breaking article "Guerrilla Theatre" which was a casualty of the website crash two years ago.
16 Feb 2017 Created a new page for the 1990 film, Berkeley In The Sixties.
14 Feb 2017 The Diggers published a "virtual street sheet" on St. Valentine's Day (today) about the controversy involving the San Francisco Recreation & Park Commission's denial of Boots Hughston's request for a permit to hold a Free Summer of Love 50th Anniversary event in Golden Gate Park. Feel free to forward this new Digger sheet to anyone who might be interested.
16 Aug 2016 Added the Loren Sears Gallery with two videos that Loren produced: the Human Be-In video and Tribal Home Video #2.
16 Aug 2016 Edited and expanded the Digger Free Store page, including announcing a new project for the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love.
6 Aug 2016 Created a new top-level section, Catalog, which has an interactive database that (someday hopefully) will list the entire collection of the Digger Archives.
5 Aug 2016 Updated the Sixties Date Machine interactive events database to include a search function.
3 Aug 2016 Finished re-coding the interactive bibliographic database of the Communication Company.
4 Jun 2016 Fixed the page, "Rap on Free Store" which had some missing links. Anytime anyone sees missing links or content, contact me.
7 Feb 2016 Added a new oral history page: Kent Minnault and his performance piece: The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom.
7 Feb 2016 Resurrected the Digger Oral History section with interviews of Peter Coyote (by Etan Ben-Ami) and Judy Goldhaft/Peter Berg (by Marty Lee and Eric Noble).
7 Feb 2016 Added a full-text, searchable PDF of Ringolevio, Section Three (the Digger story) to the Ring page. Note: file size is 30 MB.
1 Feb 2016 For anyone who wondered where the Billy Bragg recording went, the Digger Songs are now complete with lyrics and MP3 recordings on the English Diggers page.
27 Jan 2016 Added the Miriam Bobkoff Gallery of photographs of the Scott Street Commune and Kaliflower Inter-Communal Network (1971-74). This is the fifth collection in the Photo Galleries section.
25 Jan 2016 Redesigned the Once Here page.
24 Jan 2016 New page: In Memoriam: Peter Berg. Includes a link to the website for Peter's memorial. Also includes the video Remembering Peter Berg by Lila Talcott Travis.
22 Jan 2016 Working on restoring section by section, and putting the new design format on all pages. Finished restoring and updating The Digger Papers section.
21 Jan 2016 The site redesign necessitated by the server migration is moving forward. Anyone want to comment on the redesign feel free: sfdigger at yahoo dot com.
14 Jan 2016 The Digger web is back online but undergoing recovery from the server upgrade. Certain systems are not working. Attempting to do manual HTML for now.
10 Dec 2015 The Digger web is going offline with a server migration by the web provider. Will check back next month.
7 Dec 2014 Started a new page for the Angels of Light Free Theater Commune.
1 Nov 2014 Finished the new Free City Puppets page with original photos from Chuck Gould and copies of Free City Puppets flyers, and articles.
1 Sep 2014 Finished the new "Gene Anthony Gallery of Digger Photographs".
30 Aug 2014 Ragga Muffin dropped off a new Free City News item before heading back out into the vortex.
16 Aug 2014 With David Weissman's permission, I clipped the "Communal Living" segment from The Cockettes film to include in the "Inter-communal Free Network' section under the Kaliflower page.
14 Aug 2014 Under Other Histories, added It Was Twenty Years Ago Today.
13 Aug 2014 Put up a new page yesterday: Nowsreal (long time comin').
11 Feb 2014 Scanned two more original English Digger manifestos: A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England [aka the Second Digger Manifesto] (June 1, 1649) [NOTE: 1.5 MB PDF file]; and, A Watch-Word to the City of London, and the Armie (August 26, 1649) [NOTE: 3 MB PDF file]. Linked these original scans on the page listing the chronology of Gerrard Winstanley's writings.
21 Dec 2013 Fixed the Search page. Google had changed their Custom Search Engine code. Lots of search pages aren't working anymore until the webmasters fix them.
13 Dec 2013 Updated the Digger Bread page with a brief history of the six Free Bakeries that followed the first one on Waller Street in 1967. Also included a video of Jane and David retelling the story before a large crowd in 2011.
06 Dec 2013 Added a clip from David Weissman and Bill Weber's beautiful film, The Cockettes, that depicts the inter-communal Free network in the early 1970s.
18 Oct 2013 Created a "virtual gallery" of Kaliflower cover pages (volumes 1-4). If any enterprising historical researchers would like to help out on this archival project, feel free to transcribe any of the covers that contain editorial content, for example: "Ritual Magic" (vol. 3, no. 3); "Learning the Lay of the Land" (vol. 3, no. 5); "Fucking Upward" (vol. 3, no. 7); "Bags" (vol. 3, no 10). Just to name a few.
28 Aug 2013 Scanned a "Digger Dollar" which is posted on a page with my diatribe against the inflationary spiral of prices for Digger ephemera.
14 Aug 2013 Finished the last two monthly folders in the Chester Anderson Papers collection at the Bancroft Library: Chester Anderson Papers—Folder 6—May 1967 and Chester Anderson Papers—Folder 7—July-Sept 1967 . The main index to the collection is on the Communication Company Archives page. This completes the virtual archive of the Bancroft Library collection of Chester's papers, except for the folder labeled "Invisible Circus." There are no scans (yet) of that folder. If anyone out there would like to scan or photograph that folder, I would be delighted to give you advice on approaching the Library.
13 Aug 2013 Finished processing the next folder of the Chester Anderson Papers collection at the Bancroft Library: Chester Anderson Papers—Folder 5—May 1967. The main index to the collection is on the Communication Company Archives page.
12 Aug 2013 Finished processing the next folder of the Chester Anderson Papers collection at the Bancroft Library: Chester Anderson Papers—Folder 4—April 1967. The main index to the collection is on the Communication Company Archives page.
08 Aug 2013 Finished processing the next folder of the Chester Anderson Papers collection at the Bancroft Library: Chester Anderson Papers—Folder 3—March 1967. The main index to the collection is on the Communication Company Archives page. Thanks to L.B. for encouraging me to finish this project.
29 Jul 2013 Added a new historical research project to the archive: Outrageous Pamphleteers: A History Of The Communication Company, 1966-1967 by Evan Edwin Carlson, San Jose State University (2012). Here's an abstract, and here's a full-text PDF version. Also included a citation on the main Communication Company page.
30 Jan 2013 Added a transcription of comments by Peter Coyote at a panel discussion on Kerouac and the influence of the Beats that was held at the San Francisco Public Library earlier this month.
30 Jan 2013 Created a PDF document of the English Diggers' first manifesto The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649).
22 Dec 2012 Scanned and created a PDF file of one of Winstanley's first mystical revelations: The Mysterie of God concerning the whole Creation, Mankind (1649) [PDF = 57MB file size]
15 Dec 2012 For my history paper and presentation in the historical methods seminar, I scanned the Realist/Free 1968 edition of the Digger Papers and have created a high-res PDF version available for download. The Digger Papers 1968 (PDF format) is a 7MB file so beware for anyone on a slow Internet connection.
08 Dec 2012 Thanks to Miriam for noticing some broken links on the English Diggers page. Those are now fixed.

I also found (and have added to the site) a new secondary reference: The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth: (as revealed in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger mystic and rationalist, communist and social reformer) by Lewis H. Berens (London, 1906, Project Gutenberg eBook)

And was inspired to start filling in the archive of English Digger Writings (1649-1652). To that end, the following original English Digger tracts have been added to those already part of the timeline of Digger literature:

If any angel out there would care to convert the PDF files to OCR text and then do a careful proofreading to make sure there are no mistakes, please send me the resulting clean-text version. I will then create HTML files instead of relying on the PDFs.
04 Nov 2012 Announcing a new addition section for the Chester Anderson Papers. One of the co-founders of Communication Company (Com/Co), Chester was sending copies of many Com/Co sheets to "his archivist" in 1967. Those packets were deposited with Bancroft Library after Chester's demise in 1991. In 1992, I created an item-by-item catalog of the collection—which catalog languished while finishing my 25-to-life sentence in the workaday world. Recently, an anonymous angel sent scans of the Bancroft set and the result is (or is in the process of becoming) a virtual gallery of Chester's collection of ComCo sheets that he chose to send to safe keeping. The Bancroft set contains 400+ items so it's not a complete set. (See previous discussion on estimates of total Communication Company output.) But what's so interesting is that this collection represents Chester's selection. So far, I have processed 100 of the scanned images. Eventually the whole set will be available. I've been hesitant to announce the opening of this new virtual gallery but several itinerant readers have found it nevertheless. So, this will suffice as the official announcement.
22 Apr 2012 After many months of meticulous work, Chuck Gould has just completed a massive scanning and sorting project with the photographic images he took in 1967 and beyond. The result is the new selection of 135 Digger Family Photos that Chuck has (again) graciously allowed us to present in the Gould Photo Gallery.
13 Mar 2012 With inspiration from a media wizard, I finally figured out how to convert video into web formats much more successfully than previous experiments. Today, in honor of Celine Deransart, Alice Gaillard, and Jean-Pierre Ziren, who produced their history of Les Diggers de San Francisco in 1998, here is a web video of the most recent version of their film.
11 Mar 2012 An anonymous angel sent me the 1972 episode of "To Tell The Truth" in which Kitty Carlisle and the other panelists attempt to discern "the real Emmett Grogan." Watch as the panel asks about free stores and free theater, drugs, hippies and yippies.
06 Mar 2012 In working with Chuck Gould to expand the Gould Gallery of Digger photos, I noticed that the "mouse-over text captions" of the photos that were put up several years ago were no longer working. Strange, I remember coding those in HTML. Turns out Internet Explorer will produce mouse-over captions if you use the <alt=""> tag in HTML -- but NOT Firefox. In Firefox, you have to use <title=""> tag. The six gallery pages are now fixed. (Check out Gould Gallery #1 and put the mouse over one of the photos.) Yay!
06 Oct 2011 There are extra copies of the "byte size books" reissue of Trip Without A Ticket that we distributed at the Celebration of Life for Peter Berg on Oct. 1, 2011 at the Josephine Randall Museum in San Francisco. We will send one each while copies remain. If interested, please send an email.
04 Oct 2011 I mentioned this in the Digger Forum but forgot to link it here on the what's new page. Jordan Zinovich asked for the Digger Guestbook archives which I sent him. After applying his superb editing skills, Jordan sent back to the Digger Archives a special gift of light: Digger Guestbook Redux (1995 to 2004). (PDF format, 800k)
22 Sep 2011 Added a transcription of an article from the LA Free Press, March 31, 1967: San Francisco Faces the Hippies: Communication Co., Diggers Organize.
22 Jul 2010 Added a page -- after long last -- devoted to Steve Boyd and his final words.
20 Jul 2010 Added the Podcasts & Vodcasts page into the site navigation under Themes. Two videos introduce the San Francisco History Center and the Underground Press Collection. Also two audio broadcasts: the Digger Free Store and Capture of Yerba Buena.
07 Jul 2010 Posted several chapters and sections from Tim Hodgdon's gender analysis of the counterculture, Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities, 1965–83 [Columbia University Press, 2008]. The first three chapters are a new interpretation of the Diggers.
05 Jul 2010 Have fixed the navigation and ASP pages after a major crash of the FP server extensions. The site is up and working again. Have loads of materials to add. The online archives represents about 5% of the materials archive. Any budding archivists out there?
[Undated] Announcement of a film that documents the micropower broadcasting movement. (Read new posting in Free City News.)
10 May 2007 Successfully migrated to the new Lunarpages Windows account. All ASP pages seem to be working including 60s Date Engine, Digger Chronology, Virtual Free Store, BibCit, Communication Company Bibliography, etc.

On Monday, Sept. 18, 2006, 1PlanHost.com, the web provider for the Digger Archives, after months of deteriorating service, finally seems to have pulled the plug on their large customer base. For two days, no one knew what was happening. There had been no announcement from 1Plan. Web hosting review boards lit up with messages from disgruntled customers (see sample links below.) Finally, many of us who had originally come to 1Plan together (Planet Drum, Artemaya, Georoots, BearBytes) decided to cut our losses and find new shores where we could anchor our webs.

Where are we at? The first thing on the agenda was to set up new channels of communication for the ongoing conversations that were interrupted with 1Plan's departure. The first such was a new Guestbook, but after a couple days, the spam got to be ridiculous. Just as we replaced the old guestbook with the SnitzForum four years ago, we now have a spanking new Digger Forum:

Free Frame of Reference (discussion forum)

Come and join in the talk! See you around the corner.

If you would like to drop me a line, please send it to yellobug at pacbell dot net. Check back soon! Eric
25 Sept 2006 Allaying fears. Several people have written me expressing concern about the content that was in the Digger Archives site. (Several even mentioned they had been planning on using specific documents for research soon.) Let me allay those fears.

Ever since learning how to create web sites, I have followed the philosophy of having "shadow webs." These are duplicates of the live or production web site. The shadow web is where all the development takes place. Rest assured that the Digger Archive's shadow web is fine, and is backed up in numerous locations.

So why don't I just republish the old site?

I think it has to do with always looking for something new to try out. The new web host, Lunarpages.com, has numerous site tools, such as content management systems. I really want to try out CMS with the Digger Archive. If I just republish everything now, I know I will have less incentive to try out something new.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated. Feel free to join in the discussion on the Digger Forum.
20 Sept 2006 Julian left a note in the Guestbook asking for the recovery of two of the Digger Papers, so I've imported from the old site the full text, and specifically the two articles he requested:

Trip Without A Ticket
Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of Free City

These don't appear as "pretty" as they used to on the old site, because I still have not re-created the site theme, but what's important are the words, eh?
20 Sept 2006 For anyone who wants a glimpse of the havoc that 1PlanHost.com caused for all the 100s of customers whose sites *poof* disappeared overnite earlier this week, here are some pages that contain samples of the irate messages people are leaving all over the 'Net (some of the messages date from the earlier buyout of 1PlanHost by WebHostPlus, which is when the problems began earlier this year):

http://www.geekcertified.com/display-94.html

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=505737

http://forums.hostsearch.com/showthread.php?t=1786

http://www.whplawsuit.com/ (These guys purport to be gathering potential class-action lawsuit plaintiffs, but this is a minimalist site at best.)
17 Feb 2005 Added the Google engine to the Search page. Thanks to Leonard Raznick for suggesting this enhancement.
 

Gap of missing items
3 May 2003 Replaced the Frontpage top navigation bar on each page with a Xara-generated DHTML menu. Modified the overall border design for simplicity.   
24 Jan 2003 Fixed the simple Search and the Advanced Search pages.   
5 Aug 2002 Created the first and second video clips from Nowsreal on a new Free Poetry Forever page under the Themes area.
25 July 2002 Added a video clip from the film Les Diggers de San Francisco with Peter Berg discussing Digger Free.
3 July 2002 Have begun creating an index of Kaliflower Volume 3 with scans of cover pages and tables of contents for each issue.
16 Jun 2002 Added the transcription of a draft letter from Peter Berg to an unnamed Underground Newspaper, ca. 1967, to the Digger Correspondence page.
16 Jun 2002 Added the transcription of a letter from Emmett Grogan to Peter Berg, ca. 29 April 1967, to the Digger Correspondence page.
16 Jun 2002 Added the transcription of a letter from Kent to Emmett Grogan, ca. 1972, to the Digger Correspondence page.
27 May 2002 Added a new "Themes" page which contains an audio clip of Emmett rapping on Free City, and a video clip of the Free Noon Forever event on City Hall steps in 1968.
25 May 2002 Finished posting the second set of Free City sheets from 1967.
23 May 2002 Posted a new page with scans and full text of the first set of Free City sheets from 1967.
17 May 2002 In Discussion Forum, messages requested link to the "In the Clear" photo from Nov. 1966 with Emmett flashing the 2-fingered salute that he claims led to the hippie peace sign. I had not yet scanned this photo so these messages prompted me to do so:

Check out this FFR msg for the scan.
23 Jan 2002 Added a link to the Bureau of Public Secrets.
11 Jan 2002 Brought the web back online after a week of downtime due to 1Plan's server problems.
7 Dec 2001 Added a link to the Free Words project.
3 Dec 2001 Notated the Sept. 30 1966 entry in the Digger Chronology to include research that proves the dating of one of the early Digger broadsides.
3 Dec 2001 Replaced the old scans of the Early Digger Papers with new versions at higher resolution.
2 Dec 2001 Published Staging the Revolution: Guerrilla Theater as a Countercultural Practice, 1965-1968 by Michael William Doyle. An important contribution to the history of the Diggers.
24 Nov 2001 Moved the Hearthshire articles to the Archives section.
23 Nov 2001 Moved the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Human Be-In photo gallery back into the web.
22 Nov 2001 Moved the Blackbear Reunion 1987 article by Don Monkerud to the Histories section.
17 Nov 2001 Added the Catalog of Free Print Shop Publications (August 1968 to December 1972) on the Kaliflower page.
13 Nov 2001 Updated the Links to Digger Web page.
22 Sep 2001 Created a new version of the Free City News web to become an experiment in online participatory journalism.
25 Aug 2001 Added the Black's Beach Diggers to the Links page under Digger Dharma Today section.
5 Aug 2001 Finished redesigning The 60s Date Machine, with a new format for events listings, with a separate page for the Digger Chronology, and several ways to access the event database, including: All Events Listing, Text Search, Keywords Listing, Dates Listing, Date Range form, Events Drop-down List.
17 Jun 2001 Published "Diggers: An American Alternative Movement Thirty Years Later", a series of articles by Édouard Waintrop (with permission to republish here) which originally appeared in Liberation newspaper, Paris, France, December 2000.
16 Jun 2001 Published the article "It's Free because It's Yours": The Diggers and the San Francisco Scene, 1964–1968, from the book A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History, by Dominick Cavallo. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.)

Professor Cavallo has graciously given permission to reproduce this ground-breaking, first-published scholarly history of the Diggers, whom he clearly sees as fundamental to understanding the Sixties, especially the formation of the Counterculture. It is gratifying that we can include this important piece in the Archives.
25 Feb 2001 Created a page for Richard Brautigan's Please Plant This Book.
24 Feb 2001 Re-did the Early Digger Papers page to include the full text with the index of titles, and re-scanned the images. Hopefully this will make it easier to read these pieces. Readers should feel free to make suggestions for improving the web's design.
10 Feb 2001 Added a new section for the Ringolevio pages from p. 209 to 498. Each page has a navigation bar to move easily from from previous to next  page.
9 Feb 2001 Added a more full featured search page to the web using the Atomz engine. Try it, you'll like it. Getting back to the functionality that we had with the Glimpse search engine. 
6 Dec 2000 Added an article by Kenneth Rexroth on the English Diggers.
21 Oct 2000 Added an article to the Archive from 1967 that provides an intimate portrait of a Free Store and the Digger philosophy.
21 Jun 2000 Created a page for remembering those you walked once here.
28 May 2000 Added an article about the Diggers by Christine Hall ("The Diggers Are Back" from ESP Magazine, 5/17/2000).
27 May 2000 Added the article that Patricia Keats wrote about the Kaliflower collection at the California Historical Society.
25 Mar 2000 Rearranged the Morningstar section, using the Digger web theme for Pam's Chronicles pages.
14 Mar 2000 Added the Morningstar index page, with links to the articles and newsletters.
26 Feb 2000 Radio Free Berkeley is helping to coordinate an alternative media center, and offering workshops for media activists. Announcement of a film that documents the micropower broadcasting movement. (Read new posting in Free City News.)
3 Jan 2000 Added two more pages to the Photo Gallery.
27 Dec 1999 Added the essay, Using Theatrical Devices To Counter Culture (A Partial History of the San Francisco Diggers in the Heyday of Haight-Ashbury) by Marcus Del Greco to the History section.
24 Dec 1999 Re-created the (Early) Digger Papers page.
19 Dec 1999 Asked FPToday to point all HTTP 404 errors to a customized "not found" page (which also happens to contain an imaginary photo of the webmaster). 
18 Dec 1999 Redesigned and added content to the Free City News.
8 Dec 1999 The Communication Company database is ready. Search by author or list by title.
5 Dec 1999 Put up the third and fourth pages of the Photo Gallery.
28 Nov 1999 Much of the web site is back in operation after the fourth major redesign in five years. I discovered that Webcom, my web space provider for the past five years, just doesn't work for publishing the MS Frontpage 2000 web pages. So I've switched to using FP Today, another provider that had been hosting my BearBytes domain. This also has the advantage of allowing me to put up database access on the web (yeah!)

Still a lot left to do, but the following is complete (or nearly so):

What's New items prior to Nov 28 1999:
  Mar. 15, 1999. Stand Up, Diggers All! Celebrate 350th anniversary of the original Digger planting on St. George's Hill, starting April 1st, 1999. Read about it here.

Feb. 15, 1999. Peter Berg is sending dispatches from the Eco-Gathering in Ecuador that I've posted on the Planet Drum website.

Sept. 20, 1998. Added an article to the Archives about the 1983 Digger Resonance.

June 15, 1998. Information about and directions to the upcoming 1998 Annual Rainbow Gathering in the Apache National Forest in Arizona.Welcome Home!

May 24, 1998. Tom Lance sent a scanned page from the Morningstar Scrapbook showing an aerial photo of Morningstar Ranch. I put it on the main contents page for Morningstar &tc.

Scanned a photo of the Kaliflower Board which I took at the California Historical Society. The scan appears on the main contents page for Kalflower &tc.

May 19, 1998. Figured out how to put audio recordings on the web site after Celine and Alice, the two French women who are in town working on their Digger documentary, asked about the Digger Song. Also moved the video clip and Emmett's rap to a new Recordings page from the Welcome page (should make loading the home page faster.)

Tom Lance answered my query about Jane Quattlander, with a phone number, and on a most auspicious day. Happy Birthday, Jessica! Thanks, Tom.

April 30, 1998. Added a new discussion forum, Amazing Digger Tales, to the Free Frame of Reference, in part due to a request from Arthur Lisch.

April 21, 1998. Added the Morning Star graphic and Manifesto Two cover scan to the Morningstar ... Free Land page.

April 19, 1998. Pam Hanna (Read) has contributed two chapters from Infinite Points of Time: Morningstar Chronicles, another perspective on the Free Land movement. Pam: if you read this, I'm anxiously awaiting the next chapter. Blessings.

April 4, 1998. Ramón Sender Barayon sent the final chapters (16–25) of Home Free Home (the story of Morningstar and the Open Land Movement), and with some gentle prodding, I finally got to putting them up. Read and enjoy!

March 4, 1998. Created a link for the North Beach Beats to Levi Asher's www.charm.net/~brooklyn site.

March 3, 1998. Added links to Anarchy Online in the Today page.

February 27, 1998. Added a link to the Black Panther Party web site under the Sixties page (and included a pertinent passage from David Hilliard's autobiography that illuminates Emmett's relations with the Panthers.)

February 16, 1998. Put together an idea that's recurred ever since I wrote about "create the condition" and this Web. Announcing the Digger Virtual Free Store.

January 30, 1998. Finished transcribing Mutants Commune. Next up: scan the original appearance of this most remarkable essay on Free from the Berkeley Barb.

January 25, 1998. Figured out how to get streaming audio on these pages. First audio clip for the Archive: Emmett's rap on Free City from the Nowsreal film. All attempts at transcribing the hard-to-understand clip will be much appreciated. I'll post all submissions.

January 11, 1998. Added a page on Olompali Ranch and the Free Oven.

December 7, 1997. Finished the transcription of, and re-scanned all, pages of The Digger Papers (August 1968). Hope people like the new design.

November 4, 1997. Re-designed the Free City News page.

October 29, 1997. All Ringolevio pages now have their page number in the document title. Therefore, a search of Ringolevio will return the page number in the hypertext link. This should be very useful for researchers.

October 27, 1997. Tom sent a couple photos from the Morningstar gathering at the Gathering.

October 27, 1997. Some news about Radio Free San Francisco on the Free City News page.

October 20, 1997. My photo essay on the 30th Anniversary of the Human Be-In/Summer of Love is online.

October 19, 1997. Transcribed Peter Berg's remarks at the SOL 30th Celebration. Have been working on redesigning the ComCo pages to make it easier to pull up individual sheets. Note: some people have been having trouble accessing Peter Coyote's chapters. Please use the main digger archive page to get to the Free Fall Chronicles section. Perhaps someone has an out-of-date URL. Everything is working on this end.

September 9, 1997. Published an article by Peter Berg about the Turtle Island Bioregional Gathering held last year in Mexico.

August 15, 1997. Created an experimental FrontPage 97 search page for this site.

July 23, 1997. My digger/comco database is online (experimental interface using ODBC and Microsoft Access.)

June 21, 1997. Pages 209-498 of Ringolevio are now searchable.

June 17, 1997. Uploaded chapters 8 to 15 of Home Free Home which Ramon had finished laboriously converting to Web documents. Check out these next installments of the wild story of Morningstar and Wheeler's Ranch.

June 16, 1997. Uploaded a new Oral History page, with Etan Ben-Ami's first interview of Peter Coyote.

June 7, 1997 I'm putting up the newly designed Digger Archive web site, having spent the past two months working on various different ideas. Hope this works! The new address for the Web site is www.diggers.org.

January 3, 1997 Welcome to a new year (although for many of us the new year started two weeks ago at the Solstice!) Ramon sent the next four chapters to Home Free Home (sorry it took a few weeks to get these up, Ramon) including one of the funniest truest accounts of Acid that I've read (Slim's First Acid Trip...)

I also learned (finally!) how to scan large posters (in several passes which are then pasted together.) Check out the Invisible Circus poster, the Psychedelic Shop poster, the What Was That poster, the Artists Liberation Front Free Fair poster, and the Summer Solstice '68 poster.

December 1, 1996 Added a page for the Invisible Circus.

November 8, 1996 The first three chapters of Home Free Home, a salutary history of Morningstar and Wheeler's Ranches, are ready.

October 27, 1996 Ramon Sender converted the July, 1996 issue of The Most (Morningstar) Newsletter and uploaded it. This issue is a memorial to Lou Gottlieb.

October 18, 1996 Finally brought myself to put up the Artists Liberation Front article, half-done as it is (and will be for many moons.)

October 18, 1996. Here's the oldest archived version of Yahoo! (when it was a "searchable, browsable hierarchical index of the Internet") and its listing of historical 1960s websites in 1996. Note the location of the Digger Archives (when it was hosted by Webcom).


Click on image for larger version. [From Wayback machine.]

September 29, 1996 Breaking news about the Jefferson Stone Action upcoming Oct 6 1996 on the Washington Mall.

September 27, 1996 Another of Coyote's chapters is ready. Approaching Terminal Velocity tells the story of the digger caravan 'cross country in 1971.

September 3, 1996 Don Monkerud sent his report of the 1987 Black Bear Reunion with photographs.

August 2, 1996 Emilia sent two reports (by Claude and Jasmine) of the Hearth School (Hearthshire) 25th anniversary at the land June 21-23, 1996.

July 28, 1996 Finally got around to putting up the first attempt at a Links page with listings of other Diggers (and related) Resources (libraries/archives/sites, etc.)

July 15, 1996 Lou Gottlieb passed away this past Thursday (7/11/96). Ramon Sender has sent a notice with information about Lou's life, and the memorial get-together (Sunday, July 28.)

July 1, 1996 Peter Coyote uploaded a new chapter: Carla's Story.

June 8, 1996 Another chapter is ready from Coyote's work-in-progress. This is Elsa's Story about one of the Diggers whose life intersected many of the events that defined that period.

May 19, 1996 In response to a query from Ramon Sender, I transcribed the recipe for Digger Bread and wrote a little about its history.

May 17, 1996 Coyote sent another chapter: Crossing the Free Frame of Reference, which is about one of the Diggers' favorite games.

May 10, 1996 Added a feedback form to send email to Peter Coyote about his work-in-progress.

April 18, 1996 Coyote sent up another chapter from Free-Fall Chronicles. Ron Thelin and the Red House is a memoir of one of the more famous Digger collective houses.

April 17, 1996 Added Peter Coyote's chapter, Playing for Keeps, about Emmett Grogan from his new book, the Free-Fall Chronicles.

April 16, 1996 Put up photos and handouts from Ron Thelin's Memorial held this past Sunday.

March 29, 1996 Set up the new WebComBBS scripts to implement an online, interactive Digger BBS: Free Frame of Reference.

March 23, 1996 Changed the Digger Papers (free and Realist editions) pages. Adopted the index format that I used for Communication Company.

March 3, 1996 Put up the Communal Archaelogy issue of Kaliflower.

February 24, 1996 Added a page about Kaliflower and the Free Print Shop to the Digger Archives. Transcribed the KF publication, Deep Tried Frees, which offers an excellent view of the Digger ideal.

February 8, 1996 Participated in the 48-hour protest of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Read about this fascist attempt to destroy the Bill of Rights.

December 8, 1995 Many thanks to all who've written with feedback on the Digger Archives. Currently, I'm finishing an article that I'll post when it's done -- eric.

October 1, 1995 We've moved the Arte Maya Tz'utuhil Gallery to a new site (to keep our Free and Commercial offerings separate). Come visit the new site: http://www.artemaya.com/.

June 21, 1995 Solstice Gathering! Today! NOW! (For Diggers everywhere.)

Mayo 28, 1995 Ahora, tenemos las paginas, Galería de Artistas en Español.

May 25, 1995 Added two more Diggers articles from 1966, these about the Intersection game on Halloween that ended with the cops busting five of the participants, which ended with the famous photo on the steps of the San Francisco Jail.

May 22, 1995 Put up two early Barb articles by the Diggers, very important formulations of the Digger philosophy: "The Ideology of Failure" and "In Search of a Frame."

May 21, 1995 Added the lyrics to the Digger folk songs on the English Diggers page (thanks to Miriam Bobkoff for the suggestion.) Joe added three new paintings to the Arte Maya Gallery.

May 20, 1995 Finished transcription of the first Earth/Life Defense Commune manifesto. Transcribed the earliest Berkeley Barb articles about the Diggers beginnings.

May 19, 1995 Added a page for Articles By and About the Diggers.. Many thanks to Sarah Phillips for her encouragement and interest in seeing this feature.

May 18, 1995 Added the Living Here: Outer Space Views page. [Not available as of 1/98.]

April 30, 1995 Put up the Earth/Life Defense Commune page with the first of three broadsides they published from 1970-72.

Easter, 1995 Added a new painting of Lorenzo González Chavajay to the Exhibition of New Paintings. Joe also edited the Arte Maya pages.

Mar. 17, 1995 Added the Early Digger Papers. I believe this is the first compilation and publication of these early manifestos of the Digger movement. More to come... And, oh thanks to all who've signed the Guestbook and left encouraging comments. It really inspires me to continue this work!

Mar. 16, 1995 Added the Text Search form on the home page. This should be especially useful for users of the Digger Archives for doing a full-text search of the broadsides.

Eventually plan to have separate search forms for each of the local projects (Diggers, Arte Maya). Also will implement full search page for user-modified default search values.

Mar. 4, 1995 Added a new Arte Maya Gallery page: Exhibition of New Paintings to display some very beautiful new works from Guatemala!

Mar. 3, 1995 Put up The Trips Festival page with the Program notes full text, and a scan of the rare Merry Pranksters' "ACID TEST" card.

Feb. 24, 1995 Began scanning the first Communication Company broadsides, with full text online. These comprise the first of hundreds of manifestos published by the Diggers in 1967.

Feb. 5, 1995 Added a link to the Encyclopedia Brittanica article on the English Diggers of the 1640s.

January 28, 1995 Joseph Johnston re-designed the Arte Maya Tz'utuhil Gallery pages. Check 'em out!

January 21, 1995 Designed and tested the Pick-A-Page Picklist on the top page.

January 17, 1995 Changed the table of contents for the Diggers outline.

January 15/16, 1995 Added all page scans for Free City Collection #1. Re-designed home page.

January 1, 1995 Writing the history of the Artists Liberation Front (will have first part soon.)

December 25, 1994 First of the Free City Collection scanned.

October 15, 1994 Added more articles from The Digger Papers.

October 1, 1994 Added the CUI Catalog submit form. Added the pointers to the online reference works.

September 24, 1994 Added the Trip Without A Ticket to the Diggers page.

June, 1993. Tim Berners-Lee had invented a new Internet technology (which he called "the World Wide Web project") in 1989. He then introduced the first version of HTML (hypertext markup language) in 1993, and at the 1993 CALI Conference in Chicago, Thomas Bruce demonstrated Cello, the first graphical web browser. Upon returning from the conference (which I had attended as a law school staff person), I began to teach myself HTML and set out to create a web presence for the Digger Archives. Here is a graphic showing the total number of WWW sites in those early years.


Click on image for larger version. Source: Internet Live Stats
 
The Digger Archives is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Cite As: The Digger Archives (www.diggers.org) / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 / All other uses must receive permission. Contact: curator at diggers dot org.