Blog - Page 284 of 286 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Alfred B. Westrup, mutual banking reformer

September 13, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

Alfred B. Westrup was one of the mutual banking reformers active in the circles surrounding Liberty after the death of William B. Greene. Bibliography The abolition of interest a simple problem: the pending crisis the death struggle of a moneyed aristocracy and the labor pains of a new birth to industry. New York : M. Hill, 1897. (18 pages) Address on a new system of money: given at the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Banking : held in the Northwestern University Building, May 23, 1916. [Chicago? : s.n.], 1916. Citizens’ money, a lecture on the “National banking system.” […]

A New Two-Front War?

September 4, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] Now that Hurricane Katrina has probably killed thousands of Americans and threatened our oil supply, I suppose that we can expect the Bush administration to formally declare the War on Mother Nature. This unprecedented attack–for which there was, as in some other cases, some precedent and plenty of warning–should simplify things considerably for the administration. Assaults on the environment need no longer be justified. Right-thinking citizens will, in fact, demand that the government take action to subdue this newly-revealed enemy. There are precedents now, and we need to show that, once again, these colors don’t run–even when very, very […]

The FAQs! What is Anarchism?

September 4, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

OK. I’ve been meaning for some time to tackle some basic sorts of questions folks ask me about anarchism, so here goes. I’ll be breaking up the deep historical stuff with some very present-oriented, opinionated bits, which you can think of as gradually answering parts of the “why bother?” question – which is what people usually ask me about my historical work. I’m going to be uncharacteristically breezy here. If you want the footnotes, someone else can supply them for a change. I suggest the Anarchist FAQ and the Mutualist FAQ for more serious study. I was sitting outside a […]

Finding, and losing, Bessie Greene

September 2, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

I spent my research time yesterday reading a regimental history of the 1st Mass. Heavy Artillery, and was pleased to be able to confirm that the wife and daughter of William B. Greene had visited his camp near the Long Bridge on the approaches to Washington, DC, during the Civil War. This daughter seems to have fallen out of many of the biographical sources. I first discovered a mention of her in a footnote to an essay on Orestes Brownson, in the Catholic World. Today, I was able to confirm her death, in the wreck of the Schiller off the […]

“Fact and Rumor,” 1886

August 31, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

From the Christian Union, June 3, 1886: Concerning the Unitarian the Rev. William B. Greene, of West Brookfield, this story is told. A man died in the neighborhood, and the reverend Colonel was called upon to officiate at the funeral. Some time afterward, on inquiring why he was summoned to the funeral of a man not of his flock, he was told: “Mr. — did not believe in much of anything, and we thought your belief came the nearest to nothing of anybody’s, so we sent for you!” — [[Worcester Spy I guess that’s one way of looking at Greene, […]

William Greene’s Small World

August 28, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

I haven’t posted much recently because the research for the chapter on William B. Greene suddenly blossomed into the makings of a book on its own. So I’m running with it, and hope to have a basic manuscript together around the first of the year. There are a few things I probably won’t be able to do in that time, some research travel I doubt that I can fit in, and this will hardly be a finished or definitive account–but it will be substantially more than we’ve had in the way of a biography of Greene, and I think it […]

New Alchemists and Ocean Arks

August 17, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

Nancy Jack Todd has recently written another book, A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise of Ecological Design, a brief history of the work of the New Alchemy Institute, Ocean Arks International, and recent research into “living machines.” John and Nancy Jack Todd continue to be a real inspiration, tackling environmental problems in entirely practical terms, with results that are pretty astounding. I’m always amazed at how little attention their work, which stretches from the era of hippy communes to the present, gets from radicals and environmentalists. Any of the Todds’ books are worth a look. This one is a […]

Evolution? Ah, What the Heck. Teach the Controversy.

August 16, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

But teach it well! I’ve been reading a lot of new responses to the attempts to get “intelligent design” included in science curricula. There’s obviously a lot of concern out there that students will no longer be taught properly scientific theories about species development–and with good reason. But my greatest concern, reading the highly polarized debate, is that we appear to be doing a pretty lousy job of teaching evolution right now. Arguments about evolution are hardly ever just scientific arguments. Most of us recognize immediately that this is true about the controversies between the current neo-Darwinian orthodoxy and such […]

On Why You Can’t Beat a (Real) Book for Research

August 10, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

Something wasn’t looking right. It certainly seemed unlikely to me that the scholars of transcendentalism, who, after all, have been mining a very small body of texts for a very long time now, could have missed a signed article by a noted, if not central figure, in the transcendentalist journal. And they didn’t. A little time in the archives this morning proved what I had begun to suspect from a close look at the electronic texts – there is only one article by William B. Greene in the Dial, but there are two listed in APS Online, separately indexed, without […]

Just a bit more on Greene and Transcendentalism

August 8, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

Philip F. Gura has a useful article, “Beyond Transcendentalism: The Radical Individualism of William B. Greene,” in a collection called Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts (Mass. Historical Soc., 1999), edited by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright. He concentrates on Greene’s philosophical and theological writings from the 1840s, but also speculates a bit on Greene’s reasons for leaving the pulpit in West Brookfield in 1850. Greene’s relationship to Orestes Brownson, who was an important early mentor, is also explored a bit. Dean Grozdin’s American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002) adds a […]