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Carl Wennerlind has a great article online, tracing connections between the alchemical tradition and the rise of credit-money, including land-banking. “Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England” starts with the “paper-money scene” from Goethe’s Faust, traces the uses of alchemical metaphors in the early days of credit-money, and then goes on to show how various individuals who had searched for currency solutions through the transmutation of other substances into gold eventually came around to the plan of transmuting real property into credit-currency. The cast of characters is fascinating. Samuel Hartlib and his circle are […]

Ednah Dow Cheney’s Memoir of Susan Dimock : resident physician of the New England Hospital for Women and Children is now online. There’s some very nice material here, including accounts of the funeral for the two young women, after their deaths in the wreck of the Schiller in 1875. There’s also a nice tribute to Bessie Greene. You can see Susan Dimock’s gravesite online as well. Presumably, this is very close to the graves of Bessie and William B. Greene in Forest Hills Cemetary, Boston. Harvard’s Women Working archive has some very nice items relating to Susan and Bessie, including […]

Among the interesting questions that rise out of Greene’s early mutual bank writings is this one: did Greene really believe in a “labor theory of value” in the same way as other socialists of his era? In the 1850 Mutual Banking he writes: It is affirmed by some, that labor is the only true measure of value, that every thing is worth precisely what it costs in labor to produce it, and that the price of every thing ought always to be determined by the relative amount of labor expended in its production. We would remark, in answer to these […]

While this is not an exhaustive list of other archives with 17th-century New England texts online, it’s a pretty good list of places to start looking for material: The Avalon Project at Yale Law School Le Projet Albion The American Colonists’ Library The Plymouth Colony Archive Project Several of these archives have material from European and North American sources combined.

Thomas Morton’s and the settlement of “Merrymount” at Mount Wollaston in Massachusetts have long functioned in national mythology as the foil for the early puritan settlements. Along with Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, Morton figures as one of the great dissendents of early New England. A good deal of what has come down to us about the events at Merrymount is obviously skewed and propagandistic, a product of the conflicts, but it remains valuable in that light. For a sampling of original texts on the matter, check out the links on this modern tribute to “The Pagan Pilgrim: Thomas Morton […]

The Mayflower History site has quite a bit of good material on Puritan New England, as well as .pdfs of a couple of key original tracts and sermons. 17th and 18th century titles are always fun, and a couple of these are real gems: Hypocrisy Unmasked: By A true relation of the proceedings of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts against SAMUEL GORTON (and his accomplices) a notorious disturber of the peace and quiet of the several Governments wherein he lived: with the grounds and reasons thereof, examined and allowed by their General Court holden at Boston in New […]

The major colonial land bank experiments seem to be these: 1681: The Fund at Boston, In New England1686: “Blackwell’s Bank” [proposed]1732: Connecticut land bank1714: Boston land bank [proposed]1740: Land Bank, or Manufactory Scheme, Boston The debates surrounding them, beginning with Potter’s Key of Wealth, includes roughly 25-30 major pamphlets, prospectuses, decrees, etc. All of these were published by Andrew McFarland Davis, roughly one hundred years ago. The subject was already obscure by the time William B. Greene was made aware of it, in 1857. Subsequently, radicals and intellectual historians alike seem to have paid relatively little attention to the topic. […]