Month: April 2006

Readers familiar with the more accessible of Greene’s works will probably know his exchange with Francis Barry, reprinted from The Word, on the subject of “free love.” Barry’s letter begins with reference to an earlier statement by Greene, in the August 1874 issue. It turns out that the earlier piece is very interesting, a “legal opinion” on the subject from Greene. The first paragraph contains my favorite characterization of Greene’s work: [H]e can produce to order, almost any revolution out of the Mass’tts Bill of Rights… Enjoy! More material from The Word is on the way. FREE LOVE IN MASSACHUSETTS.—Its […]

Great news! Kenneth R. Gregg of the CLASSical Liberal blog has just posted an online edition of Stephen Pearl Andrews’ Science of Society. This was Andrews’ attempt to present the ideas of Josiah Warren in a more systematic manner. Ken has promised some more biographical work on Andrews, which ought to be worth waiting for. Somehow I missed the announcement of the edition of Andrews’ Love, Marriage and Divorce at the Molinari Institute “Heritage of Dissent” online library. The same update included Edwin C. Walker’s 1904 Communism and Conscience. Thanks to Roderick Long & Co. for their contributions of libertarian […]

Among the new items in the Libertarian Labyrinth is a short piece on military discipline in the 14th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the Civil War regiment William Batchelder Greene commanded during 1861-62. It consists of two reports of VIPs stopped by Greene or his officers among the forts on the Virginia side of the Potomac, where the 14th was stationed. Taken alone, it is an entertaining account. Taken in the context of other accounts of life around the Long Bridge (coming soon to the Layrinth), it looks like general officers didn’t take sentries very seriously, with results that were frequently as […]

Don Bangert, of the Current Observations blog, informs me that he has finished the scanning of Socialized Money, which he started back in November. Here’s my original notice of the project. I have been curious to see the rest of the book since Don began reprinting it, and had just recently tracked down a copy through interlibrary loan. Don has, in the interest of finishing things, posted image scans of the remaining chapters. I’ll see if I can find some time to do the OCR work, and complete a full-text searchable version. This is probably more a curiousity than a […]

As Kevin Carson recently mentioned (thanks!), I’ve been getting the Libertarian Labyrinth set up on a new, much improved site. If you want to check out some of the new material I’m working into the redesigned site, you can access it through the William Batchelder Greene pages, where you’ll find a couple of new features, including a “Timeline and Miscellany.” This is destined to be the chronological backbone of A Special Answer to a Special Prayer, my study of Greene, but it’s fun on its own as a collection of all the odds bits and pieces I’ve been assembling about […]

Awhile back, I noted Andrew McFarland Davis’ “A Connecticut Land Bank of the Eighteenth Century” as another important piece in the land bank puzzle. This particular project was chartered as the New London Society United for Trade and Commerce in 1732, and the original grant describes it as an organization for “the promoting and carrying on Trade and Commerce to Great Britain and his Majesties Islands and Plantations in America, and other of his Majesties Dominions, and for encouraging the Fishery, &c., as well for the common good of their own private interests. . .” (See digitized colonial records here: […]

The new of Journal of Libertarian Studies is out, and it’s a symposium on Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Congratulations, Kevin! It’s great to see your work being seriously engaged. See Kevin’s post for direct links to the review articles in pdf.

The pieces of the puzzle are coming together, slowly but surely, in the case of the Edward Kellogg bibliography. After some microform-related comedy of errors, I have now had a chance to look at the 4-page Usury, the Evil and the Remedy (1843), which was the last of the major editions I had yet to see. And, yes, it appears that all of Kellogg’s writings ought to be considered drafts of the same argument, though they range from 4 pages to over 300 pages in length. With the William B. Greene collation work still in progress—and now ranging into the […]