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!
Contr'un
Archive upgrades, IV
The week was full of the right kinds of interruptions: A couple of research requests I had out bore fruit, and gave me plenty of productive distractions from the ongoing archive clean-up. Barry Pateman, of Kate Sharpley Library, hooked me up with a file of old card catalog data for Mother Earth, which I’ve started to transcribe and integrate into the archive. I got a chance to talk through some difficult points of the “Essence of Mutualism” article that I’ve been working on with a knowledgeable drinking buddy. And a couple more Benjamin Tucker-related sources turned out to be a […]
Contr'un
Archive upgrades
I am gradually bringing some long-term bibliographic projects up to the point where it will make sense to publish them. While I’m still a long way from having tracked down all the work by Josiah Warren, or Joshua King Ingalls—or even William Batchelder Greene—I have reached the point where I feel like the major works are located, and I can give some useful indications of what remains to be unearthed. The goal is a series of annotated reader’s guides, ranging in scale from extremely modest to quite extensive, and one important step towards the goal is to transform the Libertarian […]
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Tucker’s “Radical Review”
A complete collection of Benjamin R. Tucker’s “Radical Review” is now available on Google Books. The searchable text is incomplete, but the page prints are better than those that I used to put together my archive of the magazine. With two sets to work from, the process of getting a fully searchable text archive—already well underway—should be accelerated considerably.