On a cold winter day in early 1976, a Gestetner machine was at work, none-too-quietly, churning out pages in the basement of a United Church building in Toronto. The project on that day was a brand-new 28-page publication (the ‘Pilot Copy’) from a newly formed organization, the Canadian Information Sharing Service. The Pilot Copy met with a positive response, the publication persisted in print for the next 18 years before transitioning to the Internet, when the organization changed its name to Connexions, by which it is still known.

There were many issues and many struggles, but for a large number people in the early 1970s, the American war against Vietnam was the crime that outraged us and drove us, by the thousands and tens of thousands, to become activists. More than 3 million people are estimated to have died in the struggle to defeat the American invaders in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. When the last Americans fled Vietnam in 1975, driven out by the victorious Vietnamese, many of us hoped – vainly as it turned out – that the era of brutal imperialist wars, massacres, and violence might be drawing to a close. We did not imagine that half a century later the defining moments of Western civilization would be Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and an unprovoked American/Israeli war of aggression against Iran that threatens to escalate to the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945.

Those who were active when Connexions was founded were well aware that the struggles they faced would be long and difficult. The very first issue proclaimed the goals of describing and evaluating actions, as well as analyzing the structures, systems, and institutions that activists have to confront.

From its first publication, Connexions featured a Subject Index to enable users to locate relevant resources. The Subject Index is now one of the key elements of the Connexions website, designed to allow both users and search engines to locate pertinent materials on the site.

The Connexions Archive website through the years

A popular slogan of the time said “Act Locally. Think Globally.” Peruse the print issues of Connexions published through the years (available online here) and you will be struck with the sheer number and diversity of activist groups and projects that ‘acted locally’ in hundreds of communities and networks across Canada and the globe, putting their energies into so many different – but interconnected – issues.

Fifty years after that CISS Pilot, Connexions has launched a new project: Getting the Word Out: The Media of Activism, a virtual exhibit about grassroots activism before the Internet. This project — more than a year in the making — was funded by Digital Museums Canada, a program managed by the Canadian Museum of History. It showcases movements and related projects along with the products, technologies and methods they used. The exhibit explores how communities of activists worked to reach other people – in their local community, in their province or region, across the country, or even internationally. It is available in English, French, and German.

Getting the Word Out showcases movements and organizations through the lens of how they communicated. Here, you can learn about the use of stencil duplicators, screen printing and radio. You can see the media produced such as flyers and leaflets; posters, signs and banners; and magazines, newspapers and periodicals.

You can read stories about the On-to-Ottawa Trek of the 1930s or the 1974 Native People’s Caravan, to name but two of the movements highlighted. The items shown are a tiny sampling of the tens of thousands preserved in both physical and digital formats in the Connexions Archive.

To connect organizations and movements working for justice and peace, to connect issues, people, and places, and to connect us to the history of the struggles waged by those who came before us.