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Nathaniel Peabody Rogers on an Anti-Slavery Tour Of the White Hills (1841)

February 16, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

An 1841 Anti-Slavery Tour Of the White Hills Nathaniel Peabody Rogers CE-4706 A CORVUS EDITION ANTI-SLAVERY JAUNT TO THE MOUNTAINS [from the Herald of Freedom of Sept. 10,1841.] We meant, from the several stages of our hurried expedition, to drop back for the Herald some of its incidents, detailed while events and impressions were fresh. But we could not find opportunity. The rapidity of our movement and constant occupation during intervals of anti-slavery action, compelled us to defer attempting it, and we must now give our readers a dull reminiscence. In company with brother Garrison, we left Concord the […]

Proudhon’s Barbaric Yawp (1840)

February 5, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Every story has to start somewhere. And when the story is that of anarchist history, it seems hard to find a more likely place to begin than Proudhon’s 1840 declaration—je suis anarchiste—which we generally treat as the first instance of at least one kind of anarchist position-taking.

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Positive Anarchy, Profusion, Uncertainty and the Uses of History

January 30, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back Project Page: Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936 RELATED: “Our Lost Continent” (April 4, 2015) “The ‘Benthamite’ anarchism and the origins of anarchist history” (April 5, 1015) “New Uncertainties and Opportunities” (April 6, 2015) “Looking Forward—Mapping Our Lost Continent” (April, 2018) “What Mutualism Was: Coming to Terms with Our Anarchist Past” (January 4, 2019) “Our Lost Continent” [tag stream] “Extrications” [tag stream] — notes on synthesis, anarchist development, etc. MAPPINGS: Notes for an Introduction SOURCES: The First Leg of the Journey DISTRIBUTARIES: The Second Leg A […]

Archy vs. Anarchy

January 28, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

These short contrasting entries constitute an attempt to sketch out some basic principles of existing archic society and some anarchic alternatives. Those alternatives are drawn largely from what we have been calling the “neo-Proudhonian” project. As such, they are not necessarily the alternatives most often proposed by self-proclaimed anarchists. They are proposed, however, as a means of approaching some baseline for a consistently anarchistic synthesis of existing anarchisms. That approach will undoubtedly require considerable elaboration and clarification of the contrasting principles and tendencies presented here—but it is important to make a start. The Polity-form: Archic social organization seems to quite […]

The Uses of a Lost Continent

December 16, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back Project Page: Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936 RELATED: “Our Lost Continent” (April 4, 2015) “The ‘Benthamite’ anarchism and the origins of anarchist history” (April 5, 1015) “New Uncertainties and Opportunities” (April 6, 2015) “Looking Forward—Mapping Our Lost Continent” (April, 2018) “What Mutualism Was: Coming to Terms with Our Anarchist Past” (January 4, 2019) “Our Lost Continent” [tag stream] “Extrications” [tag stream] — notes on synthesis, anarchist development, etc. MAPPINGS: Notes for an Introduction SOURCES: The First Leg of the Journey DISTRIBUTARIES: The Second Leg A […]

W. B. G., “Fourierism” (1844)

December 2, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

W. B. G., “Fourierism,” Boston Courier 20 no. 6167 (April 13, 1844): 1. We can be fairly certain that there was more than one writer using the initials W. B. G. in New England newspapers during the years we might expect to find articles by William Batchelder Greene. One was involved in a debate about railroads in Vermont—and was almost certainly not “our” W. B. G. Another wrote at least two letters to the Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education in 1857—and might have been. The author of two letters to the Christian Register on the subject […]

Gigi Damiani, “Jesus and Bonnot: A Christmas Tale” (FR/EN) (1927)

November 9, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

The gray car is stopped alongside a ditch, at the edge of the woods (which of its nerves has tensed? — which of its arteries has clogged, refusing the vital rush to its heart?) and under the car a young man crawls, thrashes, swears. On the road, his footsteps silent on the carpet of yellowed leaves (for we are in autumn, the sad autumn of all things!) He approaches. He is a blond vagabond, his long hair unkempt, his beard parted at the chin.

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Distributaries: “Modern Anarchism”

October 22, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Our fast-moving mountain current has spread out across the a decade’s worth of terrain, splitting off into various distributary currents. We know—or at least the driving metaphor of this work suggests—that the various currents will never unite as fully as perhaps they were mingled before Proudhon’s death. We can certainly point to instances where some form of direct influence seems to carry forward from the earliest period examined through to the anarchism of the 1880s—but we have also inherited narratives that at least flirt with the notion of a rather complete reinvention of anarchist thought in what Kropotkin called “modern anarchism.”

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Distributaries: The Reform Leagues and Anarchist Individualism

October 21, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

There are important individual stories to be told. We’ll track the journey of Dyer D. Lum to anarchism and the post-war exploits of William Batchelder Greene. Ezra and Angela Heywood will feature prominently, as we account for the relationship between The Word and the emerging anarchist movement in the 1870s. There will be a lot of apparent diversions into the spiritualist press, adventures among the free religionists and free lovers, as well as plenty of exploration of the “Yankee International” and the associated organizations. We’ll say goodbye to figures like Calvin Blanchard.

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Distributaries: Atercracy