A couple of days ago, I was sitting in the East Side Freedom Library in Saint Paul. It is an old Carnegie Library (one of about seven or eight built with Andrew Carnegie's money in the Twin Cities), which is now devoted to housing books on social justice, labor, radicalism, and generally, socialism. The Freedom Library was begun, I believe, by Peter J. Rachleff, an emeritus professor of history at Macalester College, which is just down Grand Avenue from where I live. A large percentage of the books shelved in the library seem to have been Rachleff's personal collection.
I visited the library a few years ago, so I have been looking forward to returning. It's a comfortable place and I think it will be valuable browsing the books and making discoveries. I always enjoy the serendipity of browsing, in libraries and bookstores. I'm also specifically searching for more primary sources to add to my US History courses, particularly from dissenting perspectives. That morning I was able to find and photograph a description of Edward Bellamy's roots in Chicopee Massachusetts (I had forgotten he was from western Mass!), a speech by James P. Cannon in Minneapolis in 1943, as he was about to be imprisoned for opposing US involvement in World War II, letters by George Mason and John Dickinson regarding adoption of the US Constitution, an excerpt from Thomas Dixon Jr.'s book, The Clansman describing the "triumph" of the KKK, and a description by Eugene V. Debs of his presidential campaign while in prison, in 1920.
I photographed parts of five books. I'll process these at home, and will probably add several primary source selections to my anthology as a result of this visit. In the long run, I'd like to add quite a bit to the source collection I largely inherited from Hart, for the first anthology, as well as new sources for the second (which goes beyond the years he covered). I'll be returning here regularly when I'm in Saint Paul this summer. It's open Tuesday through Thursday, so I'll try to organize my travels to allow more visits.