I recommend these databases to search for your magazine article. Remember to limit your search to just magazines:
For the alternative press:
Here's a list of magazines I think are great places to look for your article. Each links to the database list where you can search directly for articles.
Use the search below to look up a publication by its title
Remember that your Background Essay assignment requires that your magazine article be 1000 words or more. The easiest way to determine your article's length is to look in a library database. Find your article *using the instructions in the box above) in ProQuest or Academic Search Complete.
In ProQuest, the Indexing (document details), containing the article length, is at the bottom of the HTML full text page. The article below, How Conservatives Learned to Love Prison Reform, from the Mar/April 2014 issue of Mother Jones magazine has a word count of 1308.