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Puritan Freedom

January 19, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

Freedom is, on this model, freedom to do good. And good is defined as actions in accordance with God’s will. Unfreedom comes from sin, or from subjection to Satan’s power. Our natures, though fallen, are still essentially oriented towards this variety of good. We are free to pursue our true natures only when we escape the influences of sin. Depending on the specific interpretation of some of the finer points of puritan theology, this form of freedom may amount to something very like a complete surrender. The varieties of puritanism which most emphasize the competely “free” nature of God’s grace–it’s […]

John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity (1630)

January 19, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

We’ll have occassion to dwell quite a bit on the less positive aspects of New England puritanism, and Foner presents the puritan model of freedom as the foil for “American freedom” which, he says, “began in revolution.” But we shouldn’t lose track of the ways in which the puritans were, through a combination of adherence to Bible doctrine and acknowledgment of necessity, humane and progressive figures. It’s important to remember that there is not some catastrophic or revolutionary transformation in the colonial populace between the Plymouth Rock landing and the War of Independence. What occured was a gradual process, punctuated […]

On Greatness

January 19, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

GREAT IDEAS: SO WHAT’S THIS ALL ABOUT, ANYWAY? For the duration of the semester, we’re all going to be concerned with “great ideas.” Specifically, in this section, we’ll be looking at, or looking for, “Great Ideas in America.” It would be convenient if, here at the outset, we could just lay out some criteria for judging the “greatness” of ideas and go from there. With our criteria in place, we could just assemble a group of “great texts,” or Great Books, embodying ideas of unquestionably greatness, and familiarize ourselves with them. For a variety of reasons, things won’t be quite […]

Meet the Teacher

January 19, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

Hi, folks. Here’s a bit of personal information about me: I was born in the Redwoods, in northern California…long enough ago that I was legal to drink before a number of your were born. 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 […]

Natural Gas Wars, Then and Now

January 4, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

The more things change. . . and all that. There are moments when it really feels like nothing much ever changes, except perhaps the scale of our collective foolishness. Last night, over coffee, i set down Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894), in which Henry Demarest Lloyd chronicled, among other things, Standard Oils “gas wars” against the citizens and governments of various American cities, to read the New York Times coverage of the Russia-Ukraine natural gas feud. The mid-winter shutoff, in order to force an increased rate, is a tactic as old as the industry. For those who don’t know the earlier […]

Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium, 1857

December 5, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

William B. Greene’s 1857 Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium, and the Advantages of a Mutual Currency is now online in the Libertarian Labyrinth. This is the text issued during the Panic of 1857—at a time when the Greenes were actually living in France, but visiting Boston from time to time—combining elements from the 1849 Equality and the 1850 Mutual Banking, both of which have recently been added to the online version of the Blazing Star Library. I’ve also posted a fairly rough beginning to the promised Combined Edition of Mutual Banking and Equality. So far, this incorporates all […]

William B. Greene’s 1850 “Mutual Banking”

December 1, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

By 1850, the year William Batchelder Greene turned 31 and retired from the ministry, he had written, in one form or another, nearly all of his major works. He lived until 1878, and was active until about 1875, and he certainly did not stop writing, revising or organizing in support of his ideas. In 1853, in the course of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, questions of women’s suffrage and voter qualification would assume a new importance for him—and this line of thought would not see its full expression until after his Civil War service, in the essay “The Sovereignty of the […]

Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project

November 26, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

In the course of doing some research on Bessie Greene, I ran across the excellent Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project. The archive contains a large number of Jewett’s texts, from Country of the Pointed Firs to much more obscure articles, as well as some works by Annie Adams Fields and Celia Thaxter. If you search down through the text of Celia Thaxter’s letters, you’ll find the following: To Annie Fields. Shoals, May 20, 1874. I am full of sadness and of sympathy over this terrible disaster. Hardly can I think of anything else, and those two dear people haunt my […]

William B. Greene, Equality (1849)

November 26, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve finally got Equality, the first of Greene’s mutual banking books online. This is the 1849 work largely based on those still-elusive Worcester Palladium articles. Here’s the index: EQUALITY, NO. 1. The Banking System The Usury Laws Equal Laws and Equality Before The Laws The Currency The Currency—Its Evils—And Their Remedy EQUALITY, NO. II. To the Philosophers and Politicians. Solidarity The Formula of Labor Communism—Capitalism—Socialism Socialism in Massachusetts Liberty Readers of any of the later editions of Mutual Banking should recognize the 2nd, 4th and 5th sections of No. I, and readers of this blog will recognize the 3rd section […]

A first go at Google Books

November 22, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

After reading all sorts of newspaper coverage about the conflict between publishers and Google over the intellectual property rights issues involved with the Google Books scanning project, I decided to see what the project amounted to so far. I had been getting the “invitation” to try my searches on the new service for awhile, but hadn’t waded in. Having done so now, I have to say I’m underwhelmed. You’ve probably heard about the plan. Google will scan all the books in a number of libraries, setting things up so that the full text is searchable, but only a fraction within […]