Year: 2006

[This is a very nice account of how one of the children of the Valley Forge Owenite community eventually joined the Shakers. It’s one of a number of documents relating to the “high tide” of Owenite community experiments about 1826 that I’ve been collecting.] HOW I CAME TO BE A SHAKER.____ George M. Wickersham._______ While attending the memorial service of Elder Giles B. Avery, Jan. 4, 1891, I felt impressed to ask myself this question,—How came I to be a Shaker? Why I was so impressed I cannot tell; I hope it will do no harm. In the year 1824, […]

I’m updating my bibliographies for William B. Greene. The last time I did a major update, there were lots of question marks. Now, there are fewer questions about the major, book- and article-length works, but a whole lot of new questions about letters to periodicals, sermons and such. That’s progress. The contributions to radical papers, including some fairly important interventions in debates in The Word and The Index, have only really be mentioned in the literature of anarchism. The contributions to religious periodicals have been unknown or ignored. I think I’ve now tracked down at least most of the material […]

Ah, the joys of the transitional library. Google Books, which obviously searches its “full texts” using raw OCR scans, actually returns 37 books with the phrase “T)EAR SIR.” (When you do the search, it will tell you there are 50, but. . .) The full phrase, “T)EAR SIR—Tn reply to the queries eoutaiiied tn YOur note of the 26th nIt..” is from Self-paying Colonization to North America: Being a Letter to Captain John P. Kennedy by M. Wilson (A. Thom: 1848), which looks quite interesting, although at least one page-scan is entirely unreadable. That’s sad, because this is a genuinely […]

I’m in the midst of gathering together the last year’s worth of research, for a much-needed overhaul of the Libertarian Labyrinth site. I have high hopes that the site can be a really useful resource for libertarians of various stripes who value the lessons of history. In the meantime, here is a round-up of all of the material on William B. Greene, mutualism, mutual banks and land banks I have posted to this blog and The Very Idea! William Batchelder Greene Mutualist and transcendentalist bits – William B. GreeneMore William B. GreeneJust a bit more on Greene and TranscendentalismOn Why […]

Since class members will be wrapping up their work for the semester with a response to Kevin Carson’s “A Strategic Green-Libertarian Alliance,” we need to spend a little time dealing with the two keywords: libertarian and green. Both terms are contested, and are claimed by significantly diverse political movements. Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for the term Libertarianism is useful, essentially dividing those who have claimed the term between libertarian socialist and libertarian capitalist traditions, while acknowledging that the two currents are united by a preoccupation with individual liberty. All libertarians are likely to be definable, positively, in terms of a commitment […]

Anyone who has used Google Books much is used to the odd scans of binding, covers, fingers, etc. Occasionally, we get something really special from their rather odd scanning methods. Check out this nice bit of Benjamin R. Tucker memorabilia, from the online edition of Proudhon’s Contradictions Politiques.

More proof that “full text” translates to something like randomly indexed. While searching for something else, I came across this letter from A MEMBER OF A COMMUNITY, the name used in the first few “Mutualist” letters, in the New Harmony Gazette, a week before the first of those appeared. The letter asks most of the questions answered in THE MUTUALIST, Or, Practical Remarks on the Social System of Mutual Cooperation [see pdf, intro], so it seems quite likely that the author is indeed the same. The question of which community the Mutualist was a member of has occupied some of […]

Teddy Bears, and squatting and police violence, oh my! Maybe you’re wondering what this particular title is doing here. Once upon a time, when I was pamphleting more than blogging, I very slightly detourned an old teddy bear title which was already pretty anarchist-friendly. Since teddy bears were initially prone to stirring up mischief, it didn’t take more than some very slight changes to make the bunch in The Teddy Bears’ House Underground into the cuddliest squat collective you’re likely to see. In full color. Enjoy!

The land bank tradition was aimed at providing a currency adequate to ordinary trade and improvement, generally alongside some form of government currency. The largely rural population suffered from shortages of currency, thanks to fluctuations in the supply of specie and various sorts of controls on the number of bills circulating which kept economic power in the hands of those with political clout. What the partisans of the land banks proposed was another form of “monetized credit.”