Inauguration Day 2025 coincided with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. My husband and I spoke in hushed tones and exchanged gallows humor about the former. We held a party in the park near our Bay Area home to celebrate the latter. I posted copies of historical artifacts from the Civil Rights Movement on pillars in the park’s picnic area, including essays, interviews, art, and a printout of a portion of a 1967 pamphlet compiled by SNCC research director Jack Minnis.

A few friends gathered around the SNCC pamphlet, which documented how Black residents of Lowndes County, Alabama, formed an independent political party to challenge an establishment that terrorized Black people who demanded change. The pamphlet reprinted “picture-stories” that the party—the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO)—created to help residents with limited reading skills learn about how white county leaders abused their positions, and how things might change with Black control over county offices.

When I squinted my eyes and looked around the park, the scene of hastily arranged photocopies looked a little like the pages of a zine. The LCFO picture-stories looked like zines, too.

I had been intrigued by zines—self-published pamphlets often passed from friend-to-friend or mailed in hand-addressed manila envelopes—since the late 1990s, when I first saw one tucked between candles and jewelry and books of feminist theory in an acquaintance’s dorm room. 

I’d like to say that my initial encounter with a zine, and its promise of admission into a special, underground club, was the beginning of an extended love affair. But the mere rush of knowing that zines existed was enough for me. It took nearly 30 years for me to arrive at this park, in this political moment, and begin to realize that zines offered a way to say the things that I needed to say, to have the conversations that I wanted to have, to build my own “beloved community,” in Civil Rights Movement parlance.

In the early days of the new administration, I couldn’t believe how quiet everything seemed. I scanned headlines with alarm: Biden-era executive orders rescinded. Federal websites stripped of content. Far-right sycophants appointed to prominent positions. Civil service dismantled. Immigrants living in fear. But there were no protests or real resistance.

So, in February 2025, I created my first zine—a digital collection of satirical executive orders and memos, doctored photos, and other images designed and stitched together with the online graphic design program Canva—and emailed it to dozens of friends and family members. Some of the pages were well-thought out; others were not. Some were funny; some were not. But they were mine, unimpeded by a publisher, or the zeitgeist, or internet trolls.

In those first frantic months, I sent out digital zines every week or two, eventually settling on a slower cadence. Each issue cover and accompanying email focused on a different theme. Some were narrow in scope, such as the Marx Brothers’ 1933 movie, Duck Soup or Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night.” Other themes were broad, such as an issue on hope and another on American girls. All tried to make connections between the past and the present, repurposing old images for the current moment. My zines were hardly Lowndes County Freedom Organization picture-stories—they didn’t provide any kind of step-by-step guide for resistance—but I thought that some people might find solace in them. They were independent of an algorithm, a capitulating institution, or even copyright permissions.

My October 2025 issue focused on the work of John Heartfield, the German anti-Nazi artist who used existing photographs to manufacture something new. A few of Heartfield’s works were staged photographs (e.g., a dove impaled on a bayonet or a mannequin head blinded by a newspaper). But most were taken from public sources and rearranged. So an X-ray becomes a window into a dictator’s soul, rather than a tool of medical diagnosis. A Nazi salute is a plea for cash, rather than a sign of domination.

These stylized images were very much 20th-century artifacts, but they felt urgent and current. They suggested a way to dent the power that official images held. “This issue looks to Heartfield’s work to think about how we might reassemble and use images and propaganda to subvert the messages that they were originally intended to send,” I wrote in an introductory note.

Each zine felt like a draft or an experiment, meant to be eclipsed by new events, new material, new ideas. They had no end goals, no metrics, no ownership. I reworked certain elements in issue after issue, rewriting executive orders, gossip magazine pages, advertisements, and historical cartoons.

Family and friends began to respond. Someone I’d lost touch with sent in pictures of historical posters from the offices of the Social Security Administration where she worked, wondering if I would be interested in “updating” them. My tween daughter’s friend made a satirical video about the Trump/Musk falling out set to a Hamilton song. Would I want to share it?

In August 2025, I attended the annual San Francisco Zinefest—which is just what it sounds like. I saw what can happen when people make what they want to see in the world—no matter how esoteric—and seek to build a community around it.

Buoyed by these zinemakers’ enthusiasm and with help from a friend who taught me how to physically stitch bookbinding, I began to create paper zines. A women’s history month zine attempted to reclaim women’s magazines from the clutches of corporations, repurposing tropes from Seventeen and Cosmopolitan.

I began to wonder if there was a way to build a zine in community, to create something together. There is a Jewish tradition of chavruta learning in which pairs study sacred texts together, painstakingly picking apart each syllable, each word, each sentence. Chavruta partners learn from each other. They argue. They challenge. They make each other better. What if my zines could be a space for chavruta study of texts we take for granted?

This spring I conducted interviews for a zine about the Declaration of Independence. A former colleague told me he hated the accepted answer to the citizenship exam question about what the Revolutionary War was fought over (that answer: high taxes). The organizer of the local “No Kings” protests wondered what it meant for the government to “secure” rights. A Kentucky high school student speculated about what the contemporary version of “sacred honor” was. A high school teacher in North Carolina told me she teaches the Declaration as a breakup letter.

Interviewee upon interviewee commented on the contemporary relevance of the Declaration’s grievances—standing armies in times of peace without the consent of legislatures, cutting off trade with all parts of the world, transporting people across seas to be tried for pretend offenses. Most hadn’t looked at the document since high school, if ever.

Sometimes I think about the people who read the Lowndes County Freedom Organization picture-story proto-zines, at meetings or during home visits from community organizers. There were real consequences for contemplating an independent Black-controlled political party in 1960s rural Alabama. Picture-stories tried to make those on the margins a little less marginal, a little less isolated, a little more connected to a broader movement. My oral history zines are tiny efforts with only a small impact. But they, too, are meant to help us rethink what it means to be part of this community called America.

Rachel Burstein is a professional education researcher and writer and an amateur zinemaker who lives with her husband and two daughters in the Bay Area. She holds a Ph.D. in U.S. labor history.

Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard