Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics, & Culture

Circulating Now evokes the living quality of the NLM’s historical collections and the stories they offer about the experience of health and disease across ten centuries and around the world.

Explore a rich collection of pictures of ads, posters, PSAs, and educational resources from National Library of Medicine's Digital Collections.

The class resource allows students to explore the history of AIDS in the United States, visual culture and the role of imagery in the response to AIDS, and scientists’ and activists’ responses to AIDS. Responding to AIDS includes digitally available, visual and textual items related to HIV/AIDS, selected from NLM’s Digital Collections, Profiles in Science, PubMed Central and other sources, for students to view, read, and expand their understanding about diverse and complex factors in responding to a health crisis.

C. Everett Koop's two terms as U.S. Surgeon General coincided with the rise of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, an epidemic that, scientists and health officials predicted, would turn into the greatest public health catastrophe of the twentieth century. Read his full profile.

A prepared search for reputable information on HIV/AIDS from MedlinePlus

HIVinfo is an online resource offering up-to-date HIV/AIDS information to the general consumer, people with HIV/AIDS, people recently diagnosed and those who care for them.

Clinicalinfo.HIV.gov offers access to the latest, federally approved HIV/AIDS medical practice guidelines, an HIV drug database, a glossary of HIV-related terms, and resources related to HIV-related research for health care providers, researchers, people affected by HIV/AIDS, and the general public.

ClinicalTrials.gov is a website and online database of clinical research studies and information about their results. The purpose of ClinicalTrials.gov is to provide information about clinical research studies to the public, researchers, and health care professionals.

This is a tool to aid in the identification, study, and analysis of retroviral genomes and proteins. The HIV human interaction database catalogs and organizes published data in peer-reviewed journals regarding HIV-1 and human protein interactions.

ACT UP, founded in March of 1987, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Its determined advocacy and highly-focused demonstrations supported by innovative graphics utterly changed the world’s perception of people with AIDS and queer people. It radically altered the medical research and drug approval processes in the United States, and the doctor/patient relationship, while its 4-year campaign to change the CDC definition of AIDS to include opportunistic infections affecting women and injection drug users saved millions of lives across the world. ...The ACT UP Oral History Project is an archive of 187 interviews with members of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York.

TAG’s cofounders founded TAG in the conviction that it was essential to form a community organization with a full-time focus on speeding up AIDS research, advocating for increased funding, and ensuring that people with HIV and at risk for it had access to and information about treatments that could save their lives. This history page includes a 3 part video history.

(formerly The Names Project) The Quilt was conceived in November of 1985 by long-time human rights activist, author and lecturer Cleve Jones....A little over a year later, a small group of strangers gathered in a San Francisco storefront to document the lives they feared history would neglect. Their goal was to create a memorial for those who had died of AIDS, and to thereby help people understand the devastating impact of the disease. This meeting of devoted friends and lovers served as the foundation of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Their history page includes video histories.

Through this unique storytelling initiative, the National AIDS Memorial features stories that showed the intimate human experience of AIDS during the first 40 years of the AIDS crisis – the lives lost, the survivors, the heroes.

" 'Voices of Strength' is a video series that celebrates personal stories of strength, perseverance, and triumph in the face of stigma. Together, our voices can silence the stigma surrounding HIV. Includes Cleve Jones, creative force behind the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Discover how the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) revolutionized the healthcare system by challenging pharmaceutical companies, advocating for faster drug approvals, and demanding patient involvement in medical decisions in their effort to combat the AIDS crisis. (PBS Origins, 2024)

Studies of the effects of AIDS activism on current healthcare and drug research.