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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.

Connexions arose out of a desire to make connexions: to connect organizations and movements working for justice and peace, to connect issues, people, and places, and also to connect us to the history of the struggles waged by those who came before us. If you are old enough to remember the 1970s, when Connexions was founded, you will know that it was a very different time, and yet in other ways not so different at all.

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.

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.