Street Corner Society

I found this picture on the web awhile ago. From the online “Freedom Gear” company (based in Virginia, to judge by the area code given on one page).
Amusing, and relevant to Pennsylvania historically as well as presently. The story is told that after the first waves of Friends settled in the Philadelphia area, in the […]

As materials accumulate in the Street Corner Society website, I’ve found that some pieces “speak to each other,” almost as soon as I put them in the room together. One of the heaviest discussions is between James Nayler and Edward Grubb, two Quakers — one active in the 1650s, the other at the turn of […]

C. Wright Mills was a radical sociologist of the 1950s and ’60s, who influenced the generation of sociologists teaching in the 1980s-90s when I was in graduate school. Mills argued for a perspective he called the “sociological imagination.”
The history that now affects every person is world history. … [What people need] is a quality of […]

This could be it. A spike of flu deaths in Indonesia, without discernible sources, means the “bird flu” may well be spreading from person to person. This early in the flu season, without adequate preparations for squelching an outbreak, means we may have many hard months ahead of us.
I try hard to be equanimous […]

The ongoing hunger strike at “Gitmo” — the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba — brings to mind several reflections.
One of my first truly political experiences was the Attica prison uprising in September 1971. My family had moved that summer to a semi-rural part of upstate New York, and I had just started 10th […]

When I was young and impressionable, I read a SF/Fantasy book about someone who was teleported to ancient Rome. Early in the story, he was advised not to talk about “religion and politics” if he wanted to survive.
It was a pulp novel and I don’t remember the rest of it, but that advice has […]

Queries and the Religious Society of Friends, focussing on the “love and unity” query as it appears in the 1800s and 1900s.