Month: July 2007

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What Iain said!

July 31, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
In response to the news of the Liberty archive’s first-phase completion, my friend Iain commented, “now, if only someone could do that for Freedom between 1886 and 1926!” Amen! And for Mother Earth, and for any number of other important anarchist papers and journals. I’ve started to work up a text archive of the six issues of The Rebel (Boston, 1895-6), an anarchist-communist paper, which had a few Voltairine de Cleyre items in it, in part because it looked like a simple job, and because I wanted to look at something other than issues of Liberty and Woodhull and Claflin’s […]
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Two scarce J. K. Ingalls pamphlets

July 31, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Two of the hard-to-find pamphlets by Joshua King Ingalls have surfaced among the items digitized by the Labadie Collection staff. The Unrevealed Religion is listed in their index of titles, but the pamphlet scanned also includes Social Industry, the Sole Source of Increase, which was issued as an introduction to Ingalls’ columns in Fair Play. I had read The Unrevealed Religion, but had not attempted to transcribe the faint, brittle interlibrary loan copy I had access to. The faintness of the scans suggests the difficulties involved. But access to this electronic version means I can get that transcription done at […]
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Benjamin R. Tucker, The Lesson of Homestead

July 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Benjamin R. Tucker, “The Lesson of Homestead,” Liberty, 8, 48 (Jul 23, 1892), 2. The Lesson of Homestead. Regarding method, one of the truths that has been most steadily inculcated by this journal has been that social questions cannot be settled by force. Recent events have only confirmed this view. But when force comes, it sometimes leads incidentally to the teaching of other lessons than that of its own uselessness and becomes thereby to that extent useful. The appeal to force at Homestead affords a signal example of such incidental beneficence, for it has forced the capitalistic papers of the […]
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Liberty archive: phase 1 complete!

July 22, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
It’s all there in the archive, all 411 issues of Liberty and Libertas. It’s a warts-and-all collection, with plenty of warts. So far, all I’ve proven is that an individual can produce a free archive almost as sketchy as the big commercial databases. (To really scramble things, however, seems to require much more capital than I have access to.) Now comes the fun part, figuring out what software to use for the more formal archive, continuing the transformation into a searchable text archive, and starting to make use of all this material that has been so hard to access. And […]
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Liberty Site update

July 21, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
401 issues of Liberty and Libertas are now available in the archive. That leaves only 10 issues of Liberty to go! I should be able to complete this phase tomorrow. Next up: A more complete proposal for The Liberty Site—a rather ambitious scheme to answer, hopefully in the positive, the question: Can Liberty be the mother of order?
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And you thought “Lucifer” was an unfortunate name…

July 18, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Yes, Virginia, there are worse names for your radical journal than Lucifer the Light-Bearer, although that may not be immediately clear. When Lucifer changed its name and format, becoming the American Journal of Eugenics, it was considered by many a step in the right direction, towards a more staid, respectable image that would appeal to more Americans. Bolton Hall, for example, wrote in to express his approval of the changes. The masthead of the new journal was, like that of Lucifer, quite striking. What do think, shall I have some t-shirts made? I’m afraid, however, that the American Journal of […]
translations

Proudhon’s 1848 “Toast to the Revolution”

July 18, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
It is with more than a bit of fear and trepidation that I embark on a new phase of my mutualist researches, with a working translation of Proudhon’s “Toast to the Revolution.” I neglected my French studies for a good couple of decades, before returning a year or so back to tackle the untranslated portions of Proudhon and the writings of a few of his contemporaries. It has been an interesting year, bringing myself back up to speed, and learning to read at a level I had never really attempted as a student. There are undoubtedly some mistakes in the […]
mutualism

Proudhon at Google Books

July 16, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
As I mentioned in the last post, Google Books’ search engines do miraculous things sometimes, the sort of miraculous things that make finding anything an iffy proposition. I make no claims for the completeness of the list that follows. Finding what I did find was something of an adventure. However, I can happily announce that most of Proudhon’s major work is available, if not obviously so, on Google Books. Volumes undoubtedly lack pages, have text obscured by the fingers of workers, are blurred or bleed of the edge of the screen, but these are just the things we are learning […]
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Google Books is hiding things again

July 13, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
More stupid search engine tricks. Back in May, I noted some peculiarities of Google Books’ search engines. If you follow the links from that original post, you will notice some new peculiarities, including the disappearance of the 1849 Amos E. senter edition of Equitable Commerce from the results for: inauthor:josiah inauthor:warren. That important edition is still available from Google Books; you can follow the link above to see what Equitable Commerce looked like before Stephen Pearl Andrews edited it. But it, and one other listing, no longer show up in a general search for Warren’s work. There are still five […]
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Bits of Liberty’s History

July 12, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Labors of love are notoriously bad at paying the rent, and other work has been a little slow, so I’m digging into my personal archive a bit to keep a roof over my head while I work on the Josiah Warren book and Liberty archive. I was fortunate enough, some years ago, to pick up a lot of original issues of Liberty, along with a few related items: letterhead stationary from the Liberty offices and the portrait of Michael Bakunin which Tucker claimed was the first faithful likeness published in the United States. I have put one each of the […]