William F. Ringle Collection

The William F. Ringle Collection (1933-1984) includes correspondence, family papers, financial records, and legal documents; subject files, research and fieldwork notes, unpublished bibliographies, papers and reports; teaching files, course outlines, and class rosters; and books, periodicals, newspapers, and other printed materials, including alternative publications, such as underground newspapers and comic books, small press monographs, and ephemeral materials such as flyers and pamphlets. All of the books and monographs ca. 2,325 and some of the serials ca. 950 from the Ringle Collection have been separated from the 61 boxes of manuscript materials, and are integrated and intershelved with related cataloged holdings in the Browne Popular Culture Library. A local note links the provenance of the cataloged books to the Ringle Collection.

The collection reflects various aspects of Ringle's research, teaching, and bibliographic work in the areas of cultural anthropology, Ethnobotany, and Ethnopharmacology, as well as his professional memberships in such organizations as AMORPHIA (The Cannabis Cooperative), S.T.A.S.H. (Student Association for the Study of Hallucinogens, Inc.), N.O.R.M.L. (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), and the Peace and Freedom Party.

Of particular interest are the notes, bibliographies, papers, published items, and ephemeral materials compiled by Ringle for his research projects, which provide insight into the emergence of youth subcultures and protest movements in the 1960s, and their history and development throughout the next decade. The special strength of this collection is Ringle's contemporaneous ethnographic research on the hippie and psychedelic drug subcultures of the era.

Ringle was a teacher, ethnographer, bibliographer, and collector, rather than a prolific writer, and the collection reflects these personal strengths and weaknesses. While the printed material spans from 1900 to 1984, the core of the collection. Series IV is formed by research conducted by Ringle from 1967 to 1978, and includes manuscripts for his paper "Dealers and Dopers in Sema: Ethical and Methodological Problems in the Ethnographic Study of Illegal Aspects of the Culture of Contemporary Society" (1971), and his bibliographies "Psychedelics and Society: A Topically Indexed Survey of the Technical, Popular and Folk Literature on the Origins, History and Functioning of the Psychedelic Drug Scene of the Emergent Hip Subculture" (1970-1973), "Words of the Struggle: A Selected Bibliography of Works on the American Negro" (1968), "Blacks and Blues: Selected Bibliography of Black Music and Musicians in American History and Culture" (1972), and "Rock Anthem of the Hipocalypse: Musical expression, popularization, and mass diffusion of hip ethos through commercialization in the pop arts and entertainment media" (1972).