UC Berkeley Library

In 1971, an uprising occurred at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York. Shahan’s history thesis offers a reinterpretation of the riot by integrating multiple primary source accounts written from different perspectives in order to connect cross-racial unity among prisoners to their heightened politicization during the 1960s and 1970s. Using databases that indexed literature from a variety of disciplines and library catalogs, Shahan was able to find secondary sources analyzing the events. First-hand accounts were located at Bancroft Library and retrieved from other libraries using Interlibrary Loan and newspaper articles and film footage provided other primary sources. Prof. Bielenberg praises her persistence and resourcefulness in locating elusive sources and asserts that Shahan’s “paper really is an epic treatment of the Uprising, and will provide scholars in the field with a wonderful body of research to draw upon.”