The terms
underground press or
clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant (governmental / religious / institutional) group. In specific recent (post-World War II) Western European and American context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed
underground papers associated with the
counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the
United States,
Canada,
United Kingdom, and other western nations. It can also refer to the newspapers produced independently in repressive regimes. In
German occupied Europe, for example, a
thriving underground press operated, usually in association with the
Resistance. Other notable examples include the
samizdat and
bibula, which operated in the
Soviet Union and
Poland respectively, during the
Cold War.