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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 the eugenics literature of the late 19th century. Some important pieces of that literature are available on the website of the Melungeon Heritage Association. (Check out the left navigation menu or click on “Tools for Research. Thanks to Terry from the Left Libertarian list for the heads-up.)

With Laundry Day fast approaching, I’m getting down towards the bottom of the t-shirt pile, so yesterday I wore the one with the peace sign. Honestly, it’s always towards the bottom of the pile, mostly because—much more than most of the genuinely inflammatory shirts I own, more, perhaps, than the one featuring Subcommandante Marcos saying “Ya Basta!” with only one finger—it seems to actively enrage people. It’s a post-9/11 thing, and I more or less understand. To fight or not to fight has come to be one of those Defining Questions. While the President has recently said that disagreement about […]

[I posted an earlier version of this yesterday, but a computer glitch devoured a couple of hours of bibliographic work. Here is an complete version, with the lost material restored and some additions.] Slowly but surely, all of Alfred B. Westrup’s mutual banking material is making its way into the archive. This week’s first addition is Westrup’s magnum opus, The New Philosophy of Money (1st ed., 1895). Like Greene’s Fragments, Tucker’s Instead of a Book, and Ingalls’ Reminiscences, Westrup’s major work is largely stitched together from newspaper debates, correspondence and portions of earlier works. It’s value is in collecting all […]

I’m happy to say that I’m on track to posting considerably more than the 3000 original pages that has been my goal for 2006’s scanning and archiving initiative. Looking ahead to 2007, I’m hoping to make it the Year of Liberty, with my major research push being to develop an understanding of the development of individualist anarchist thought in the pages of Benjamin R. Tucker’s journal, and my main archiving efforts going towards a hypertext archive of the major banking and currency debates in Liberty and many of the papers with which it was in dialogue as I can get […]

I’m teaching another online section of Great Ideas this fall. This time around, my students and I will be comparing current events with those in colonial America, and exploring questions about the limits of liberty and tolerance. The Very Idea! blog will be home to the “lecture” portion of the class, and some of the discussion.

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, something of a Great Book. It was a Pulitzer prize winner, and stands as one of the classics in the field of American intellectual history. It’s not an introductory text, and it is sometimes difficult. And I am not going to require you to read all of it. In fact, I will only require you to read a few sections. But I will be constantly […]

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 them? [This will be your first discussion question.] How do the values of the documents appear similar to, or different from, the values of modern American society? For the first two weeks, we will be easing into our readings, while we get some theoretical issues on the table. It is not obvious, for example, exactly what is meant by a “great idea.” We’ll spend some […]

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 Fish & Wildlife Service, and the for first five years of my life, my neighbors largely consisted of ducks, geese and mosquitos. We were in southern Idaho, north-central California, Oregon, Washington, and Georgia before I entered elementary school. My father ended up transferring into the Endangered Species Program of the Service, and we finally settled in Ojai, California for about 12 years, where he was […]

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 civil rights advocate, best known forA Southern Prophecy: The Prosperity of the South Dependent upon the Elevation of the Negro, originally a series of essays in The Independent, June-July, 1887. Blair’s anti-protectionism was of the sort to warm the heart of an anarchist. In his writings on “special legislation” he takes the approach of encouraging farmers, his primary audience, to repeal all the legislation they […]

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 in America and Europe. Communism, socialism, and nihilism in doctrine and in deed. The Chicago Haymarket conspiracy, and the detection and trial of the conspirators,” you’re not going to have any trouble figuring out on which side he’s coming down. Of course, the author was also a member of the police force, so. . . The link above is to an electronic copy in the […]