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I’m currently working a lot on the years 1825-27 in America, the high-water mark period for Robert Owen’s influence in the U.S., as well as the period out of which the “Mutualist” of 1826 emerges. My search for clues to the identity and location of that early critic of Owen and contemporary of Josiah Warren was one of the things that convinced me to pursue the Distributive Passions project. Expect a sort of miscellany of period pieces here over the next week or so. MR. R. OWEN’S LETTER At Sea—New York Packet, October, 1825. Americans—I am again hastening to your […]

My notebooks are full of leading, if perhaps unanswerable, questions and what-if‘s regarding radical history. At one time, when my focus was on the tag-end of antebellum utopian socialism movements in the postbellum era, I began to work out some of my ideas in the form of speculative fiction: The Old Dispensation is a story of socialism in decay and disrepute, following a rag-tag caravan of old school radicals, who probably should have found new tricks, off to Oregon, where they ride their hobby-horses into an obscure and unexpected glory. I’ll be dusting off my accounts of Lanquist’s Exodus, Solly’s […]

God and Government: John Cotton, Letter to Lord Say and Sele (1636). John Winthrop, Essay Against the Power of the Church To Sit in Judgement on the Civil Magistracy (1637) Samuel Willard, The Character of a Good Ruler (1694) [edited; note potential source biases]; biography Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (1740) Science and Theology: An Astronomical Description of the Late Comet or Blazing Star (1665) [intro] Increase Mather, Heaven’s Alarm to the World (1692) [facsimile, skip intro]from Cotton Mather’s The Christian Philosopher: “On Comets” (1721) Mather Bayles, The Comet (1744) Jeremiah Newland’s […]

We have become accustomed to thinking that science and religion are fundamentally at odds. Debates over school science curricula—to pick one recent example—play out in the mass media as if only two polar positions were possible. Without question, there are people—believers in the absolutely literal truth of the whole Bible on one end, and militantly atheistic rationalists on the other—for whom there can be no middle ground, but the vast majority of Americans do not seem to fall into either of these extreme camps. The statistics frequently quoted by both extreme camps suggest that a majority of Americans find some […]

Crispin Sartwell has launched the Josiah Warren Project, an archive and collection of resources by and about Warren. There are some very rare items already in the archive, including material from the Peaceful Revolutionist and The Quarterly Letter. Crispin is apparently working on a book about Warren. Many of you will be familiar with The Exquisite Rebel, the Voltairine de Cleyre collection he edited with Sharon Presley.

I’ve now worked through six of the first eight volumes of the free religionist paper, The Index, and it strikes me that we’re going to have to revise somewhat our sense of what the important periodicals of the late 19th century were, for individualist anarchists. At the very least, we’re going to have to add one to the list. A few surprises: Tucker’s translations of Proudhon’s “The State” and “The Malthusians” both appeared in The Index in 1877, prior to their appearance in Liberty (which began publication in ). Following the end of the Tucker-Andrews debate on Proudhon in 1876, […]

Monday morning, as I was getting ready to head out the door to campus, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a story about Wikipedia–mostly positive. The next day, the Wall Street Journal hosted one of their mini-debates, pitting the Wikipedia model against the traditional model of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia is all over the news right now, and getting pretty good press. That doesn’t change the nature of that very strange beast. You should always, with any research source, be prepared to double-check what you find there. That one of the basic, hard truths of research. It’s why instructors demand multiple sources. […]

It’s a good week for currency cranks. I was working through some microfiched pamphlets from John Zube’s Libertarian Microfiche Project, trying to work my way through this “roll call” phase of my researches on mutual banking. I consider John a kindred libertarian-packrat, and I’m always finding little gems, usually with his notes attached, on fiche I picked up for some other text. How To Escape the Coin Monopoly (1895), published anonymously by the Equity Publishing Company of Oakland, California, is just such a gem. I won’t speculate right now on the authorship, but the sources are obvious and explicit. The […]

I know a few folks are following this who don’t have access to the syllabus, so here are the relevant readings for the last two weeks: A Model of Christian Charity (1630) The Simple Cobbler of Agawam (1647) Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641) Green-Libertarian Platform (2006) Trial of Anne Hutchinson (1637) (biography)Roger Williams, from The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644)Samuel Rutherford, from Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (1649)Massachusetts anti-Quaker law (1658)Letters of Quaker martyrs Ann Dyer and William Leddra prior to their executions (read pages 187-188, 377-387)

At its limits, tolerance can be explosive, deadly. In our readings about religious conflicts in colonial New England, we’ve seen that the stakes of differences of opinion could be raised to the point where those outside the envelope of acceptable beliefs could be banished or even killed. Remember that one of the primary sparks for the American Revolution was the passage of the “Intolerable Acts” in 1774. We generally think of tolerance as sort of a warm, fuzzy affair, but its flipside, intolerance, suddenly takes us into an entirely different terrain. There comes a point when we simply can’t or […]