Colin Edwards collection on Palestine
Call Number
Date
Creator
Extent
Language of Materials
Abstract
Collection consists of newsletters, press releases, brochures, and other ephemeral material, from organizations based in the United States that advocated for the sovereignty and rights of the Palestinian people. These materials were collected by Colin Edwards, a Welsh-born journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 1980s.
Biographical and historical note
Colin Edwards was a Welsh-born journalist who specialized in a number of different topics, among them foreign policy and the Middle East.
Born in 1924, he spent his childhood in the town of Gorseinon, near Swansea. After finishing local schools, he attended the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, and in 1942 was conscripted into the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy. After the war, he attended St. Catherine's College, Oxford, for a year, before leaving to pursue a career in journalism. Initially he covered the United Nations in New York, and from 1949 onward he worked as a correspondent embedded with British forces in Malaya, then as a war correspondent in Korea and Indochina.
By the early 1960s he had moved to the United States, settling in the San Francisco Bay area, where he began working with radio station KPFA in Berkeley, the first of a network of listener-supported, non-profit, alternative stations operated by the Pacifica Foundation. As an interviewer and producer of programs, he covered a range of topics, with most of them related to international politics, including current events in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Northern Ireland. One area that he frequently returned to was the Middle East, with interviews and documentaries that explored the founding of the state of Israel, the Six-Day War, and the struggle of the Palestinians for self-determination, and their attempts to gain international recognition and to establish a homeland.
By the mid-1970s he had left radio to work as a free-lance writer and journalist. One of his long-standing areas of interest was the life and work of the poet Dylan Thomas. He conducted interviews with over 150 people who knew Thomas, and used these as the basis for a series of documentaries broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and an unpublished biography.
Edwards died on 11 July 1994, in Oakland, California.
[Source: Wikipedia article, "Colin Edwards (journalist)," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Edwards_(journalist), and website for the Pacifica Radio Archives, https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/ , both accessed on 9 April 2021.
Arrangement
The contents of this collection were originally purchased as five different lots from the same antiquarian bookseller. Upon learning of their shared provenance and subject matter, the processing archivist decided to create an artificial collection, drawing together the ephemeral materials with the serial publications, to form one collection on the topic of Palestinian civil rights and advocacy organizations.
The collection is arranged in groups of materials by organization or title of publication, and then in largely chronological order within each group. It should also be noted that some of the newsletters contained inconsistent systems of numbering, skipping or repeating volume numbers, or in some instances omitting them altogether. In such cases, the date of publication was used as the means of arrangement.
Content Description
The Colin Edwards collection consists of newsletters, press releases, brochures, and other ephemeral material, from organizations based in the United States that advocated for the sovereignty and rights of the Palestinian people. These materials were collected by Edwards, a Welsh-born journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 1980s.
The collection consists of several series of publications from different organizations, including:
--League of Arab States (Cairo): this includes a small number of pamphlets, fliers, and broadsides from the League's New York-based Arab Information Bureau, as well as a larger series of press releases. The former material includes items that justify the oil embargo of 1973 as a means of drawing attention to injustices committed against the Palestinian people, a pamphlet by the historian Arnold Toynbee, and broadsides of statements published in the New York Times, including on by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. The group of news releases includes statements from League representatives based at the United Nations in New York, usually in response to actions taken against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
--Palestine Congress of North America: An organization based in the United States, of members of the Palestinian diaspora who supported statehood for Palestine and the political objectives of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The monthly newsletter of this organization is represented in this collection, with 26 issues dating from 1982-1985.
--Palestine Information Office, and Palestine Research and Education Center (Washington, DC): This was a public information organization representing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), operating in Washington from 1978 until 1987, when the administration of Ronald Reagan declared the PLO to be a terrorist organization and Secretary of State George Shultz ordered that the PIO be shut down. The PIO published the bi-monthly magazine "Palestine Perspectives" from 1978-1982, after which it was published by the PREC. Both runs of this periodical are represented in this collection from 1978 to 1988.
--Palestinian Solidarity Committee (Albany, CA): A grass-roots organization, supporting the aims of the Palestine Liberation Organization, with chapters in Pennsylvania, New York, Colorado, and California. This collection contains 10 issues of the newsletter of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter, dating from 1976-1977.
Subjects
Conditions governing access
The collection is open for use in the Reading Room of the Archives and Special Collections department of the NYU Abu Dhabi Library.
Conditions governing use
This collection is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use materials in the collection in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).
Preferred citation
Identification of item, date; Colin Edwards collection; MC.076; box number; folder number or item identifier; Archives and Special Collections, New York University Abu Dhabi Library.
Immediate source of acquisition
Purchase, April 2020.
About this Guide
Processing information
Processed by Brad Bauer, April 2021.