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At its limits, tolerance can be explosive, deadly. In our readings about religious conflicts in colonial New England, we’ve seen that the stakes of differences of opinion could be raised to the point where those […]

This is the third in a series of explorations of the mutualist tradition—or, perhaps more appropriately, traditions. The particular perspective they present is, as I’ve said, somewhat revisionist. It has been some time since I’ve […]

The materials we are looking at this week all revolve around questions of religious tolerance, and the more extreme consequences of stepping “outside the envelope” of what could be tolerated in Puritan Massachusetts. The Simple […]

As it turns out, physician and temperance reformer Diocletian (“Dio”) Lewis (1823-1886) was a friend of Lysander Spooner, and Spooner features in Lewis’ book, Talks about People’s Stomachs (1870). I was unfamiliar with Lewis until […]

I’ve resumed my work extracting significant debates from The Index with an 1876 exchange between Ezra H. Heywood and Elizur Wright on the “Family Bank.” Heywood takes the standard anti-usury line, while Wright, who was […]

After a long, complicated set of negotiations and near-misses, I’ve scheduled a first seminar at the local progressive campus ministry. Initially, we had talked about something focusing on William B. Greene in his role as […]

If you’ve been putting off taking a look at some of the goodies on Google Books because of the inconvenience of paging through volumes, there is some good news. Many of the “full view” titles […]

Now we tackle the most difficult of our preliminary questions: What is a Great Idea? We’ve already talked a bit about “greatness,” but the other half of the term threatens to get at least as […]

I’ve been fortunate enough to get my hands on a fragile inter-library loan copy of Alfred Westrup’s The Abolition of Interest, and will be transcribing it over the next couple of days. The bibliography is […]

As part of the process of tackling “great ideas,” we’ll be doing a certain amount of meta-talking—talking about what we’re talking about, and why we’re talking about it in the first place, or why we’re […]