republishing works from the past

It was kind of quiet in this forum so to get the ball rolling I'll tell people about a plan of mine.

The plan is to post public domain works from the past.  My reasons are numerous.  For starters, I love history and want to share that love with everyone else.  The stories and ideas of our past should not be allowed to die, or ever be declared irrelevant.  It is ridiculous to even think that somone might argue against knowing where our society came from.

Since we'll probably be moving away from automatically putting blogs and documents on the front page, most of the stuff I post will stay in the history section.  But hopefully some of it will get voted to the front page.

Working class and rebel history interested me the most: stories of common people getting organized and fighting the establishment.  So expect a healthy dose of early unions, anarchists, squatters, First Nations, surrealism, situationism and especially my absolute favourite: wobblies. 

A wob is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a revolutionary union that wants to build "one big union" that could use a general strike to give control of society to the working class majority.   The IWW was founded in 1905 and was a dominant force in American politics until a major crackdown for resistance to the First World War put the union into a slow decline in the 1920s.  They are still around to this day, with thousands of members.  Recently they organized a Starbucks in Manhatten, won better wages and force the company to hire back two workers who'd been fired for trying to start a union.  They recently campaigned for unions inside Starbucks in 20 cities in 4 countries.

I'll probably start with something written by Lucy Parsons (1853 to 1942), an anarchist and feminist who helped found the IWW.  And I've also been reading a collection of articles from The Rebel Worker, a magazine published by student wobblies at Roosevelt University in Chicago 1965-66.  There was a really good essay called "On The Unwholesomeness Of Honest Toil" by Louise Crowley, a young white male's account of the riots in Harlem in 1964, and "Mods, Rockers and the Revolution" by Franklin Rosemont.. those are three that I'd like to share, and soon.

In the case of Lucy Parsons, all of her work is now in the public domain.  The introduction to "Dancing in the Streets!" (The Rebel Worker collection) says that the attitude of the people writing for the magazine was that they hoped others would republish.  But I'm still going to try contacting the editor of the book (who was also an editor of the magazine) just be to on the safe side.

For those of you who'd like to join me, there are plenty of works on Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive that are in the public domain and already typed up, ready to be posted here.  For long pieces, you may want to consider serializing them.

Jeremy