Hexbears. I need your help. I have a term paper that I need a topic for. Here’s the rub: It’s for US history, and the topic has to be US history before 1893. I wanted to write about labor unions, which took off in the US around the 1870s, but the real “history” of organized labor in the US takes place well past 1893. So the professor will very likely reject that.
I’m not a history person. I know, I know “those who don’t learn from the past…” I don’t want to write about the American civil war and all that shit though. It’s been done to death. Any ideas on a topic I could pick that would be more interesting and more left-leaning?
Not asking for any help writing it. I just need some help picking a topic that would be interesting to research.
Its kinda cringe but maybe the early anarchist movements/communes in the u.s pulled from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_the_United_States
Historian Wendy McElroy reports that American individualist anarchism received an important influence of three European thinkers.
William Godwin’s anarchism which "exerted an ideological influence on some of this, but more so the socialism of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.
After success of his British venture, Owen himself established a cooperative community within the United States at New Harmony, Indiana during 1825. One member of this commune was Josiah Warren, considered to be the first individualist anarchist.
The Peaceful Revolutionist, the four-page weekly paper Warren edited during 1833, was the first anarchist periodical published, an enterprise for which he built his own printing press, cast his own type and made his own printing plates.
After New Harmony failed, Warren shifted his ideological loyalties from socialism to anarchism which anarchist Peter Sabatini described as “no great leap, given that Owen’s socialism had been predicated on Godwin’s anarchism”.
The emergence and growth of anarchism in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s has a close parallel in the simultaneous emergence and growth of abolitionism as no one needed anarchy more than a slave
Josiah Warren put his theories to the test by establishing an experimental “labor for labor store” called the Cincinnati Time Store, where trade was facilitated by notes backed by a promise to perform labor. The store proved successful and operated for three years after which it was closed so that Warren could pursue establishing colonies based on mutualism. These included Utopia and Modern Times.
Henry David Thoreau was an important early influence in individualist anarchist thought in the United States and Europe. Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher and leading transcendentalist. Civil Disobedience is an essay by Thoreau that was first published in 1849.
Not cringe at all. This is perfect. Thank you.