Soon, Broadside began releasing records, some made in real studios, others using the lo-fi apartment office archives. If the 89 songs that make up this collection come from diverse sources (and sound it), the simplicity of the music -- anything involving more than a guitar and an untrained voice sticks out -- keeps the audio inconsistency from being a distraction. You won't have any problem hearing the voices here. You want to test your speakers? Get a Sting album.

Following the similar (but less topical) "Sing Out!" Broadside disseminated songs the way it had been done before records became the lingua franca. For 50 cents an issue, anyone could learn an evening's worth of new tunes, with words from last week's newspaper headlines and melodies that probably came from some old English ballad -- as duly annotated in the box's book-length liner notes, which also contain complete lyrics to every song and even the newspaper clippings that inspired them.

(I'll leave the obvious preludes to hip-hop sampling and MP3 file sharing to any musicology or media student in need of a thesis topic. Help yourself. But be careful: In one of the set's most affecting songs, "But If I Ask Them," Sis Cunningham takes up the cause of Aunt Molly Jackson, an Appalachian woman whose songs were sung far and wide without bringing any relief to the harsh poverty of her life. "No one thought to wonder whose [song]/Here it was for them to use," sings Cunningham. "The song became no longer mine." Maybe Metallica should learn that one for the next Napster court hearing.)

Collectively, this music provides an unsentimental education about inconceivable catastrophes ("My Oklahoma Home [It Blowed Away]," "The Ballad of Martin Luther King"), monumental wrongs (racism, the nuclear threat, capitalist exploitation, the draft, the war, sexism) and courageous efforts to right them (like Paxton's "Ain't That News"). In our time, when knowledge of the past evaporates faster than instant messages on AOL, many of the subjects and events are so far off in the wasteland of times past that they might as well have never happened. Like the social crisis of interracial dating. The 15-year-old Janis Ian's previously unreleased first recording (credited, as a Broadside in-joke on a Dylan alias, to "Blind Girl Grunt") of "Society's Child" is here, in a 1966 version titled "Baby, I've Been Thinking." Of course, a climactic capitulation to prejudice makes it the only protest song in memory to give up and do the wrong thing ("One of these days ... [things] must remain"). Maybe its true cultural value is for the endorsement of pass-the-buck irresponsibility.

The songs bring the forgotten past to enduring life. In "Ballad of William Worthy," Ochs sings of a 1961 incident in which an American journalist was jailed upon his return from Castro's Cuba, a place U.S. citizens were -- and, technically, still are -- barred from visiting. Writing before the birth of Elián González' parents, Ochs nails the entire absurdity of the government's position in two lines: "It is strange to hear the State Department say/You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay." Peter La Farge's tragic "Ballad of Ira Hayes" notes how selective America can be about its heroes; the resonant profile of a Native American later became a hit for Johnny Cash. Seeger, who to this day remains an unreconstructed protest singer, details an obscure and highly entertaining bit of history in Malvina Reynolds' deliciously witty "Do as the Doukhobors Do." Where else could you learn about five 19th century women, Russian immigrants to Canada, who expressed their objections to the nation's educational policies by attending a speech by the prime minister in the buff?

"The Best of Broadside" is such a mother lode that beyond fine recordings of the era's topical standards -- Reynolds' "What Have They Done to the Rain," Seeger's "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," Paxton's "What Did You Learn in School Today," Matthew Jones' "Hell No, I Ain't Gonna Go" -- that many of the tracks that could have been omitted are still museum-quality, like "Song for Patty," a sympathetic 1974 number about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst that sounds a lot like Dylan but is credited to one Sammy Walker. (Another Walker contribution, "Catcher in the Rye," is even more Dylanesque. He also gets points for singing the version of Ochs' loving Woody Guthrie tribute, "Bound for Glory," here.) Ochs' heart-wrenching "Changes," a non-topical emotional outpouring that doesn't really belong here, is included in a tender live version that could well serve as the era's epilogue.

Even the post-dated songs warrant their place in such glorious company. Deborah Silverstein and the New Harmony Sisterhood Band's "Draglines" defies its 1984 vintage with the finely woven harmonies of Celtic folk singing to lodge a strong, not strident, protest against strip mining. Although a dubious bow to star power would seem the only explanation for why Lucinda Williams' "Lafayette," a good-times travelogue that was indeed published in Broadside in 1979, is here, the liner notes make its inclusion out to be a courtesy to Cunningham. (Thankfully, Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," which Friesen thought enough of lyrically to put it in the magazine, did not receive equal consideration.)

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