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    08/07/2024
    Common Sense (version 2) cover

    Common Sense (version 2)

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    Chapter: 5 | Listen: 3

    Thomas Paine has a claim to the title The Father of the American Revolution because of Common Sense, the pro-independence monograph pamphlet he anonymously published on January 10, 1776; signed “Written by an Englishman”, the pamphlet became an immediate success. It quickly spread among the literate, and, in three months, 100,000 copies (estimated 500,000 total including pirated editions sold during the course of the Revolution) sold throughout the American British colonies (with only two million free inhabitants), making it the best-selling book ever. Paine’s original title for the pamphlet was Plain Truth; Paine’s friend, pro-independence advocate Benjamin Rush, suggested Common Sense instead. The pamphlet appeared in January 1776, after the Revolution had started. It was passed around, and often read aloud in taverns, contributing significantly to spreading the idea of republicanism, bolstering enthusiasm for separation from Britain, and encouraging recruitment for the Continental Army. Paine provided a new and convincing argument for independence by advocating a complete break with history. Common Sense is oriented to the future in a way that compels the reader to make an immediate choice. It offers a solution for Americans disgusted and alarmed at the threat of tyranny. (Introduction by Wikipedia)     [chương_files]  

    28/06/2024
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    Practice and Theory of Bolshevism

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    Chapter: 17 | Listen: 3

    This book records Bertrand Russell’s impressions of the new regime after a 1920 visit to Russia following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, including his meetings with Lenin, Trostky, and Gorky. It includes a chapter that was authored by Dora Black, educational theorist and feminist author, and Russell’s spouse. This chapter was unfortunately removed in the second edition, which was issued after Dora and Bertrand divorced. This recording is dedicated to my darling wife, Jill. Happy Hanukkah and Happy 2020! – Summary by Landon D. C. Elkind     [chương_files]  

    28/06/2024
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    Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906

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    Chapter: 13 | Listen: 3

    “Mother Earth was an American anarchist journal that described itself as “A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature”. Founded in early 1906 and initially edited by Emma Goldman, an activist in the United States, it published articles by contemporary activists and writers in Europe as well as the US, in addition to essays by historic figures.” This is Volume 1 of the series. This is the second number of the magazine.     [chương_files]  

    13/06/2024
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    Woman and War

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    Chapter: 3 | Listen: 5

    Olive Schreiner was a South African writer born in 1855 to missionary parents in the Eastern Cape. She is credited with being the first Internationally famous South African Novelist. She was an extraordinary person and was one of the earliest campaigners for women’s rights, including the right to equal pay for equal work, saying: “The fact that for equal work equally well performed by a man and by a woman it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone shall receive a less recompense is the nearest approach to a willful and unqualified “wrong” in the whole relation of woman to society today”. She opposed racism of all kinds whether against the Boers or Black People and she was also a pacifist and anti-war campaigner. She was a vociferous critic of British Imperialism in South Africa and of Cecil Rhodes and his policies while prime minister of the Cape. As a result of her public support for the Boers, all her manuscripts and her house were burned by the British during the Anglo-Boer War and she was interned in a concentration camp for several years. Her most well known book is “The Story of an African Farm” from 1883, in which her own free thinking and progressive views on equality, sexuality and marriage are explored. It became a best seller in Europe and The United States, praised by feminists for portraying a strong heroine in control of her own destiny. The book was originally published under […]

    13/06/2024
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    Untimely Papers

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    Chapter: 10 | Listen: 4

    This is a posthumous collection of essays by Randolph Bourne. Many originally appeared in the journal “The Seven Arts,” before the controversial end to its run. Also included is the unfinished manuscript of “The State,” the book Bourne worked on until his tragic death in December, 1918, at the hands of the Spanish flu pandemic. In the words of the book’s editor, poet James Oppenheim, “We have nothing else like this book in America. It is the only living record of the suppressed minority, and is, as so often the case, the prophecy of that minority’s final triumph.” – Summary by Ben Adams     [chương_files]  

    12/06/2024
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    Anarchism and Other Essays (Version 2)

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    Chapter: 24 | Listen: 4

    Emma Goldman, the most famous anarchist in American history, shows the whole range of her iconoclastic thought in this collection of essays. Drawing from a wealth of illustrative material, including the examples of fellow anarchists and radicals of her own acquaintance, modern martyrs, dissident playwrights, poets, and authors, etc., she delineates the main themes of her philosophy with incisiveness and evangelical passion. Included among these themes are: a definition of decentralized anarchism itself; the ambiguous morality of direct action; the curse of modern patriotism; the horrors of early twentieth-century prisons; the need for an entirely new kind of education; the relationship of legal marriage to true love; the insidious danger of Puritanical thought within feminism itself; the deadly spread of sex trafficking; the limitations or even undesirability of woman suffrage; and the extraordinary revolutionary potential of modern theatre. Sadly, none of these themes seem obsolete even to a modern reader; every one of them has direct application to twenty-first century society. – Summary by Expatriate     [chương_files]  

    10/06/2024
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    Areopagitica (Version 2)

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    Chapter: 5 | Listen: 4

    The noblest and most extensive defense of freedom of the press in English. Although Milton was sufficiently practical to serve as a censor of books himself when his opposition to this practice was ignored by the government, he never lost his conviction that the best way to battle falsehood was to let it have its say and be defeated by the superior power of truth. Strangling infants in the cradle was simply not his style. In this long essay, in the form of a five-part Classical oration addressed to Parliament (the counterpart of the Areopagus or council of elders in ancient Athens), he brings to bear on this subject a wide variety of arguments, including antique precedents, philosophical and religious considerations, and his own experience as a published author. The document presents the portrait of the idealistic core of the British republic struggling against the political expediency that upholds the government. (Summary by Thomas Copeland)     [chương_files]  

    09/06/2024
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    On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (Version 2)

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    Chapter: 2 | Listen: 5

    Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government) is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American War. (Summary by Wikipedia)     [chương_files]  

    05/06/2024
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    Treaty with China

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    Chapter: 2 | Listen: 5

    “A good candidate for ‘the most under-appreciated work by Mark Twain’ would be ‘The Treaty With China,’ which he published in the New York Tribune in 1868. This piece, which is an early statement of Twain’s opposition to imperialism and which conveys his vision of how the U.S. ought to behave on the global stage, has not been reprinted since its original publication until now.” (the online, open-access “Journal of Transnational American Studies” published it in the spring, 2010). (Introduction by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Twain scholar and Director of American Studies at Stanford University, used by permission) (Transcription by Martin Zehr for the Journal of Transnational American Studies, American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, UC Santa Barbara – http://escholarship.org/uc/acgcc_jtas)     [chương_files]  

    02/06/2024
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    United Kingdom House of Commons Speeches Collection, volume 2

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    Chapter: 14 | Listen: 8

    This is the second LibriVox collection of speeches given in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. The collection comprises recordings of 14 historic speeches given to the UK House of Commons between 1766 and 1956. Readings are of speeches origninally given by parliamentarians including William Pitt the Elder, John Stuart Mill, Dadabhai Naoroji, Lady Astor, Stanley Baldwin, Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn. (Summary by Carl Manchester)     [chương_files]