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The only required textbook for the course is the first volume of Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought—The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800. (Check Bookfinder for cheap copies.) Parrington’s work is, in its own right, […]

Let’s begin with a first reading assignment. Please read the Mayflower Compact and the Declaration of Independence. Read them carefully. These are founding documents, marking the beginnings of new societies. What ideas are emphasized in […]

Hi, folks. Here’s a bit of personal information about me: I was born in the Redwoods, in northern California. My dad worked for our favorite Uncle Sam, as a wildlife refuge biologist with the US […]

In working through Alfred Westrup’s New Philosophy of Money, I’ve encountered a number of interesting writers with whom I was previously unfamiliar. One of these is Lewis H. Blair, a southern anti-protectionist, currency reformer and […]

Radical historians have their guilty pleasures too, and Michael J.Schaack’s Anarchy and anarchists has to rank right up there in my top ten list. Subtitled “A history of the Red terror and the social revolution […]

I’ve been reading the Westrups’ The New Philosophy of Money (1895), and have been pleasantly surprised. I had read his Citizens’ Money (1891) and his contributions to Liberty several years ago and had, perhaps unfairly, […]

I’m in the process of pulling together the “second generation” mutual bank writings of Alfred B. Westrup and Herman Kuehn. Here’s a tidbit from Liberty [Sept. 1893 (9: 46), p. 1.] . “For always in […]

Alexander Campbell is the figure most associated with Kelloggism, the adoption of portions of Edward Kellogg’s currency and banking theory by elements in the greenback and labor movements. In the course of my recent w0rk […]

The more we dig, the more land-based currencies schemes we seem to dig up. Thomas Mendenhall was the author of two pamphlets proposing currencies “bottomed” (as he put it) in land value. These works influenced […]

The Special Collections Library at University of Michigan has been digitizing pamphlets from the Labadie Collection for a web archive. There are currently 226 pamphlets online, and it’s a very nice selection of things, including […]