In the 1960 and 70s, the University of Connecticut, like many college campuses across the United States, was awash in protests—and the buttons that came with them. “The stuff being produced was entirely ephemeral,” says Graham Stinnett, the archivist who oversees the university’s alternative press collection. The pin-on buttons, along with the bumper stickers, signs, T-shirts, and alt-weeklies of the counterculture, were meant to be discarded. But the archivist and librarians on campus made the then-radical decision to collect the items in the same manner they might have catalogued a…
