Blog

As it turns out, physician and temperance reformer Diocletian (“Dio”) Lewis (1823-1886) was a friend of Lysander Spooner, and Spooner features in Lewis’ book, Talks about People’s Stomachs (1870). I was unfamiliar with Lewis until […]

I’ve resumed my work extracting significant debates from The Index with an 1876 exchange between Ezra H. Heywood and Elizur Wright on the “Family Bank.” Heywood takes the standard anti-usury line, while Wright, who was […]

After a long, complicated set of negotiations and near-misses, I’ve scheduled a first seminar at the local progressive campus ministry. Initially, we had talked about something focusing on William B. Greene in his role as […]

If you’ve been putting off taking a look at some of the goodies on Google Books because of the inconvenience of paging through volumes, there is some good news. Many of the “full view” titles […]

Now we tackle the most difficult of our preliminary questions: What is a Great Idea? We’ve already talked a bit about “greatness,” but the other half of the term threatens to get at least as […]

I’ve been fortunate enough to get my hands on a fragile inter-library loan copy of Alfred Westrup’s The Abolition of Interest, and will be transcribing it over the next couple of days. The bibliography is […]

As part of the process of tackling “great ideas,” we’ll be doing a certain amount of meta-talking—talking about what we’re talking about, and why we’re talking about it in the first place, or why we’re […]

Back in May, I posted a couple of section’s from Bolton Hall’s Things as They Are: an essay, “The Delivery from Bondage;” and three “fables” featuring Snap, the Philosopher Dog. I finally got a chance […]

Much-overdue props to Robert P. Helms for launching deadanarchists.org, an anarchist history site with current emphases on Voltairine de Cleyre and anarchist history of the Philadelphia area. Robert contributed a profile of Hugo Bilgram to […]

Only one more of Alfred B. Westrup’s major pamphlets to track down and scan—I think. . . The Financial Problem (3rd ed., 1891) is now available in pdf format. As I mentioned in an earlier […]