Month: November 2005

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Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project

November 26, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
In the course of doing some research on Bessie Greene, I ran across the excellent Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project. The archive contains a large number of Jewett’s texts, from Country of the Pointed Firs to much more obscure articles, as well as some works by Annie Adams Fields and Celia Thaxter. If you search down through the text of Celia Thaxter’s letters, you’ll find the following: To Annie Fields. Shoals, May 20, 1874. I am full of sadness and of sympathy over this terrible disaster. Hardly can I think of anything else, and those two dear people haunt my […]
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William B. Greene, Equality (1849)

November 26, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve finally got Equality, the first of Greene’s mutual banking books online. This is the 1849 work largely based on those still-elusive Worcester Palladium articles. Here’s the index: EQUALITY, NO. 1. The Banking System The Usury Laws Equal Laws and Equality Before The Laws The Currency The Currency—Its Evils—And Their Remedy EQUALITY, NO. II. To the Philosophers and Politicians. Solidarity The Formula of Labor Communism—Capitalism—Socialism Socialism in Massachusetts Liberty Readers of any of the later editions of Mutual Banking should recognize the 2nd, 4th and 5th sections of No. I, and readers of this blog will recognize the 3rd section […]
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A first go at Google Books

November 22, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
After reading all sorts of newspaper coverage about the conflict between publishers and Google over the intellectual property rights issues involved with the Google Books scanning project, I decided to see what the project amounted to so far. I had been getting the “invitation” to try my searches on the new service for awhile, but hadn’t waded in. Having done so now, I have to say I’m underwhelmed. You’ve probably heard about the plan. Google will scan all the books in a number of libraries, setting things up so that the full text is searchable, but only a fraction within […]
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Greene, Whittier, Brownson

November 15, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve posted two new biographical tidbits in the Libertarian Labyrinth. The first is from Annie Fields Author’s and Friends (1896), a collection of reminiscences. It tells the story of “the Bachiler eyes:” Old New England people were quick to recognize “the Bachiler eyes,” not only in the Whittiers, but in Daniel Webster, Caleb Cushing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Bachiler Greene, a man less widely known than these distinguished compatriots. Mr. Greene was, however, a man of mark in his own time, a daring thinker, and one who was possessed of much brave originality, whose own deep thoughtfulness was always planting […]
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Taking Proudhon (and controversy) out of “Mutual Banking”

November 14, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
A funny thing happened on the way to the modern edition of William B. Greene’s Mutual Banking. We know that with Mutual Banking, as was so often the case with Greene’s work, the editorial refinement process over the years consisted largely of whittling away at his early works, Equality (1849) and Mutual Banking (1850), cutting down towards the kernel of occasionally sprawling explorations. The editors of Proudhon’s Solution to the Social Problem, who gave us the modern edition of Mutual Banking, only continued that trend. The result is a bit peculiar. While modern critics have at times taken pains to […]
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Lord Acton on William Batchelder Greene

November 9, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
I just read through Acton In America (Shepherdston: Patmos Press, 1979; S. W. Jackman, ed.). It’s a delightful, predictably opinionated read. It describes Lord Acton’s visit to the US in 1853, with entries covering New York, Boston and Emmitsburg, Maryland. Naturally, he met many of the prominent citizens of the cities. He seems to have liked Orestes Brownson as well as anyone he met. Richard Henry Dana took him to see the workings of the Massachusetts State Constitutional Convention, where he met William B. Greene. He apparently did not see Greene give the speech on the qualification of voters which […]
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Edward Kellogg in “The Word”

November 4, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
I was printing out a couple of issues of Ezra Heywood’s The Word, and ran across a listing of books available from the Heywoods’ Co-Operative Publishing Co. in 1873. William B. Greene’s then-newly-published The Blazing Star tops the list, followed by Mutual Banking. Then come two by Heywood: Yours and Mine and Uncivil Liberty. Josiah Warren’s True Civilization (the 1869 title; see Ronald Creagh’s great Warren bibliography for that convoluted publishing history), Lysander Spooner’s No Treason, and Joshua King Ingalls Land and Labor round out the list-along with one other, Edward Kellogg’s A New Monetary System. Kellogg’s work is an […]