Blog

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 […]

Back in May, I posted a couple of section’s from Bolton Hall’s Things as They Are: an essay, “The Delivery from Bondage;” and three “fables” featuring Snap, the Philosopher Dog. I finally got a chance […]

Much-overdue props to Robert P. Helms for launching deadanarchists.org, an anarchist history site with current emphases on Voltairine de Cleyre and anarchist history of the Philadelphia area. Robert contributed a profile of Hugo Bilgram to […]

Only one more of Alfred B. Westrup’s major pamphlets to track down and scan—I think. . . The Financial Problem (3rd ed., 1891) is now available in pdf format. As I mentioned in an earlier […]

I’ve had occasion in the past to reference the Melungeons, “tri-racial isolates” of the southern US. Reports of these groups, and others such as the “Tribe of Ben Ishmael,” made up an important part of […]