Half a hundred Libertys

It’s a very, very good day for those interested in the earliest manifestations of mutualism in the United States. William Henry Channing’s The Spirit of the Age (1849-1850) is now available, in its entirety, with minimal scanning defects, from Google Books. I had previously had the chance to read through an original bound volume, and transcribe some contributions. Now I can finally sit down to read through the entire run. 150 or so pages in, my sense of the importance of this early journal just keeps increasing. Go check it out!

The archive of Liberty is growing steadily. I passed the 1000-page mark today, which is about 1/3 of the run, in terms of actual pages; about 1/4 in terms of difficulty of scanning the material; and about 1/2 of the way in terms of the actual content of the paper. The response has been very encouraging. Wendy McElroy has offered her Index To Liberty as a means of wading into the archive in a more systematic manner, and it looks like we will be incorporating that index into the archive as it becomes more than just a pile of pdfs. […]

It’s all there in the archive, all 411 issues of Liberty and Libertas. It’s a warts-and-all collection, with plenty of warts. So far, all I’ve proven is that an individual can produce a free archive almost as sketchy as the big commercial databases. (To really scramble things, however, seems to require much more capital than I have access to.) Now comes the fun part, figuring out what software to use for the more formal archive, continuing the transformation into a searchable text archive, and starting to make use of all this material that has been so hard to access. And […]