Year: 2005

Contr'un

Finding, and losing, Bessie Greene

September 2, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
I spent my research time yesterday reading a regimental history of the 1st Mass. Heavy Artillery, and was pleased to be able to confirm that the wife and daughter of William B. Greene had visited his camp near the Long Bridge on the approaches to Washington, DC, during the Civil War. This daughter seems to have fallen out of many of the biographical sources. I first discovered a mention of her in a footnote to an essay on Orestes Brownson, in the Catholic World. Today, I was able to confirm her death, in the wreck of the Schiller off the […]
From the Archives

“Fact and Rumor,” 1886

August 31, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
From the Christian Union, June 3, 1886: Concerning the Unitarian the Rev. William B. Greene, of West Brookfield, this story is told. A man died in the neighborhood, and the reverend Colonel was called upon to officiate at the funeral. Some time afterward, on inquiring why he was summoned to the funeral of a man not of his flock, he was told: “Mr. — did not believe in much of anything, and we thought your belief came the nearest to nothing of anybody’s, so we sent for you!” — [[Worcester Spy I guess that’s one way of looking at Greene, […]
Contr'un

William Greene’s Small World

August 28, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
I haven’t posted much recently because the research for the chapter on William B. Greene suddenly blossomed into the makings of a book on its own. So I’m running with it, and hope to have a basic manuscript together around the first of the year. There are a few things I probably won’t be able to do in that time, some research travel I doubt that I can fit in, and this will hardly be a finished or definitive account–but it will be substantially more than we’ve had in the way of a biography of Greene, and I think it […]
Contr'un

New Alchemists and Ocean Arks

August 17, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
Nancy Jack Todd has recently written another book, A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise of Ecological Design, a brief history of the work of the New Alchemy Institute, Ocean Arks International, and recent research into “living machines.” John and Nancy Jack Todd continue to be a real inspiration, tackling environmental problems in entirely practical terms, with results that are pretty astounding. I’m always amazed at how little attention their work, which stretches from the era of hippy communes to the present, gets from radicals and environmentalists. Any of the Todds’ books are worth a look. This one is a […]
Contr'un

Evolution? Ah, What the Heck. Teach the Controversy.

August 16, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
But teach it well! I’ve been reading a lot of new responses to the attempts to get “intelligent design” included in science curricula. There’s obviously a lot of concern out there that students will no longer be taught properly scientific theories about species development–and with good reason. But my greatest concern, reading the highly polarized debate, is that we appear to be doing a pretty lousy job of teaching evolution right now. Arguments about evolution are hardly ever just scientific arguments. Most of us recognize immediately that this is true about the controversies between the current neo-Darwinian orthodoxy and such […]
Contr'un

On Why You Can’t Beat a (Real) Book for Research

August 10, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
Something wasn’t looking right. It certainly seemed unlikely to me that the scholars of transcendentalism, who, after all, have been mining a very small body of texts for a very long time now, could have missed a signed article by a noted, if not central figure, in the transcendentalist journal. And they didn’t. A little time in the archives this morning proved what I had begun to suspect from a close look at the electronic texts – there is only one article by William B. Greene in the Dial, but there are two listed in APS Online, separately indexed, without […]
Contr'un

Just a bit more on Greene and Transcendentalism

August 8, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
Philip F. Gura has a useful article, “Beyond Transcendentalism: The Radical Individualism of William B. Greene,” in a collection called Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts (Mass. Historical Soc., 1999), edited by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright. He concentrates on Greene’s philosophical and theological writings from the 1840s, but also speculates a bit on Greene’s reasons for leaving the pulpit in West Brookfield in 1850. Greene’s relationship to Orestes Brownson, who was an important early mentor, is also explored a bit. Dean Grozdin’s American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002) adds a […]
Blazing Star Library

William B. Greene, “Song of Espousal” (1840)

August 7, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
We find in the “TOKEN” for 1841, the following beautiful poem from the pen of Lieut. GREENE, son our our esteemed Postmaster, Nathaniel Greene, Esq. It breathes the very soul of martial poesy, and resembles in spirit the celebrated “Sword Song” of Kerner, which once rung through the German forces, calling them to valiant deeds.–Boston Eve. Gazette

[…]

Contr'un

Mutualist and transcendentalist bits — William B. Greene

August 6, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
William Batchelder Greene (1818-1878), the “American Proudhon,” is a strangely underdocumented character, given his importance to the individualist anarchist tradition. He has yet to find his biographer, though many of his contemporaries considered his life interesting enough to mention in other contexts. This entry from George Willis Cooke’s Historical and Biographical Introduction to the Rowfant Club reprint of The Dial gathers some of those accounts (and I have gathered the relevant text in the Libertarian Labyrinth.) We know that there are articles and letters in periodicals going back into the early 1840s which have, at best, been mentioned as sources […]
Contr'un

Radical Parables

August 2, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] As I’ve been immersing myself in Bolton Hall’s work lately, I’ve been finding that nearly half of the book-length works consist of parables of one sort or another. The parable form is fairly common among radical writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Before he wandered off into anti-semitism and eugenic speculation, Morrison Isaac Swift, the anti-imperialist, wrote a collection of entertaining short fictions, nearly all of which amount to radical parables. A number of Mary Marcy’s books published by Charles H. Kerr took the form of socialist parables. Of course, these latter works were a bit […]