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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 […]

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.”

I’m currently working a lot on the years 1825-27 in America, the high-water mark period for Robert Owen’s influence in the U.S., as well as the period out of which the “Mutualist” of 1826 emerges. […]

My notebooks are full of leading, if perhaps unanswerable, questions and what-if‘s regarding radical history. At one time, when my focus was on the tag-end of antebellum utopian socialism movements in the postbellum era, I […]

God and Government: John Cotton, Letter to Lord Say and Sele (1636). John Winthrop, Essay Against the Power of the Church To Sit in Judgement on the Civil Magistracy (1637) Samuel Willard, The Character of […]

We have become accustomed to thinking that science and religion are fundamentally at odds. Debates over school science curricula—to pick one recent example—play out in the mass media as if only two polar positions were […]

Crispin Sartwell has launched the Josiah Warren Project, an archive and collection of resources by and about Warren. There are some very rare items already in the archive, including material from the Peaceful Revolutionist and […]

I’ve now worked through six of the first eight volumes of the free religionist paper, The Index, and it strikes me that we’re going to have to revise somewhat our sense of what the important […]

Monday morning, as I was getting ready to head out the door to campus, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a story about Wikipedia–mostly positive. The next day, the Wall Street Journal hosted one of their mini-debates, […]