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11/07/2024
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Notes On Democracy

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Chapter: 24 | Listen: 4

American journalist H.L. Mencken’s Notes On Democracy was originally published in 1926, yet is still relevant almost 100 years later. Mencken has proposed some succinct and satirical definitions of democracy, such as, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” And, “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey house.” One predictable result of democracy, Mencken explains, is that the professional politician, who’s objective is always the job, and not the principle, is in a constant struggle for office and its rewards. The defeated candidate commonly takes his failure very badly. Regarding these sore loser “lame ducks”, he says: “…now and then there appears one whose wounds are too painful to be assuaged…. …This majestic victim not infrequently seeks surcease by a sort of running amok. That is to say, he turns what remains of his influence with the mob [common man] into a weapon against the nation as a whole, and becomes a chronic maker of trouble.” Notes On Democracy is a refreshing description of what a democracy is, and how it works, …and how it doesn’t work, and has timeless relevance in light of today’s political climate. – Summary by Lisa Reichert     [chương_files]  

10/07/2024
Vindication Of The Rights Of Men, In A Letter To The Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned By His Reflections On The Revolution In France cover

Vindication Of The Rights Of Men, In A Letter To The Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned By His Reflections On The Revolution In France

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Chapter: 5 | Listen: 2

Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism. It was published in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which was a defence of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church of England, and an attack on Wollstonecraft’s friend, the Rev Richard Price. Hers was the first response in a pamphlet war that subsequently became known as the Revolution Controversy, in which Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1792) became the rallying cry for reformers and radicals. Wollstonecraft attacked not only monarchy and hereditary privilege but also the language that Burke used to defend and elevate it. Wollstonecraft was unique in her attack on Burke’s gendered language. In her arguments for republican virtue, Wollstonecraft invokes an emerging middle-class ethos in opposition to what she views as the vice-ridden aristocratic code of manners. Influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, she believed in progress and derides Burke for relying on tradition and custom. She argues for rationality. The Rights of Men was Wollstonecraft’s first overtly political work, as well as her first feminist work; as Wollstonecraft scholar Claudia L.Johnson contends, “it seems that in the act of writing the later portions of Rights of Men she discovered the subject that would preoccupy her for the rest of her career.” It was this text that made her a well-known writer. (Note: For the sake of clarity in listening the author’s extensive and informative footnotes have been omitted in this recording.) – Summary by David Wales     […]

10/07/2024
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Colored People of Chicago

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Chapter: 3 | Listen: 3

This book presents a summary of the findings conducted by the the Juvenile Protective Association in Chicago before the changes brought on by the war-time economy. The study’s researchers were A. P. Drucker, Sophia Boaz, A. L. Harris, and Miriam Schaffner. Its author, Louise DeKoven Bowen was a well-known philanthropist and suffragist in Chicago. The summary makes no strong argument on its own, but presents simple facts and observations that would alert the reader to the need for social and economic reform in the city. – Summary by KevinS     [chương_files]  

10/07/2024
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Whom We Shall Welcome: Report of the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization

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Chapter: 33 | Listen: 5

In 1952, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which had many provisions objectionable to many Americans. President Truman vetoed it, but it was passed in June 1952 over the President’s veto. President Truman established the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization [in September 1952]. He directed the Commission “to study and evaluate the immigration and naturalization policies of the United States” and to make recommendations “for such legislative, administrative, or other action as in its opinion may be desirable in the interest of the economy, security, and responsibilities of this country.” This Report is the result of the Commission’s study, and contains the recommendations for an immigration policy best suited, in its judgment, to the interests, needs, and security of the United States. “The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and Respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and priveleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.” George Washington, December 2, 1783. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was superseded by a new immigration policy in 1965. – Summary modified from the text and by TriciaG NOTE: Written in the early 1950s, this report contains terms and attitudes not culturally acceptable today (such as using the term “colored” and “wetbacks”).     [chương_files]  

09/07/2024
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Problem of China

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Chapter: 17 | Listen:

In 1920-21 Bertrand Russell lived and taught in Peking (Beijing), publishing this book on his return to England. In 1920 he had visited Bolshevik Russia, talked to Lenin, and was unimpressed by what he had seen. China, however, was another matter. Like many travelers, he often saw what he wanted to see, and after Europe’s Great War, he found many signs of hope in China. In that country, he was welcomed by the young intellectuals who saw him as a representative of modern and scientific thought. They, however, were trying to cast off much of the old tradition that they thought held China back, and they were often opposed to Russell’s urging that they hold on to much of their own tradition, which he saw as superior to that of Europe, particularly after the terrible slaughter of 1914-18 on the continent. His work is very much a product of its time, and today, almost a century later, many are still trying to explain China — a very different China from Russell’s — to an outside world. (Nicholas Clifford)     [chương_files]  

09/07/2024
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Deportation Cases of 1919-1920

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Chapter: 12 | Listen: 4

“The study here presented embodies the findings of an investigation into the recent [1919-1920] deportations of persons deemed to be unlawfully in the country. . . Its purpose is to call public attention to practices that are inconsistent with the American tradition of justice and fair-play.” – Summary by Constantine Panunzio, from the introduction     [chương_files]  

09/07/2024
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Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule

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Chapter: 22 | Listen: 3

First written in Gandhi’s native language Gujarati, this booklet advocates for Indian non-violent self-rule during the struggle for Indian independence against the British Empire. It is written as a dialogue between two characters. In it, the “Reader” serves as a typical Indian countryman (the targeted audience for Hind Swaraj), who voices common beliefs and arguments of the time concerning Indian independence, while Gandhi, the “Editor,” explains why those arguments are flawed and interjects his own valuable arguments of self-reliance, passive resistance and the Indian identity. The Gujarati-language publication was banned from publication by the British in India, causing Gandhi to translate it to English himself to evade the British authorities, as well as rally support from English-speaking Indians and international supporters of independence. It is now considered the intellectual blueprint of India’s independence movement. (Mary Kay and Wikipedia)     [chương_files]  

09/07/2024
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Six Months In Mexico

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Chapter: 37 | Listen: 4

This is an account of Nellie Bly’s travels through Mexico in 1885. The book was originally a series of individual articles that she submitted to the Pittsburgh Dispatch newspaper for publication. In them she described the conditions of the people and the political system she found in Mexico. Her narratives focused mostly on the impoverished and disadvantaged in a country whose government was extremely corrupt. Bly was perhaps what we now term a feminist, striving for the empowerment and independence of women. She certainly pioneered the field of investigative reporting. Nevertheless, Bly’s journalistic objectivity is often tainted by an uninformed, 19th-century, “gringo” world view. Bly’s travels in Mexico ended abruptly after the Dispatch published an article she wrote exposing that government’s ill treatment of another journalist who criticized the regime of President Porfirio Diaz. Bly’s Mexico articles were later published in book form in 1888. (Summary by James K. White)     [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 […]

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]