For the last few months I have been indexing the journal, the Progressive Librarian. The journal began in 1990 and is a rich, dense publication. I’ve been saving as I go here.
Last night I was working on the special supplement Anarchism & Libraries (Fall 1999). In doing some backup documentaition for the Iron Column I ran across the website for the Kate Sharpley Library dedicated to the preservation of the history of the anarchist movement.
The “Fight for History” at the site is especially salient to us today.
The Fight for History:A Manifesto
excerpt….
The bourgeoisie’s historians have to rewrite the past, the way that Big Brother did time and again. They need to disguise the fact that the civil war was a class war. Whoever controls the present, controls the past and whoever controls the past decides the future. Official History is the bourgeoisie’s history and its mission today is to wreath nationalism, liberal democracy and the market economy in myth so as to have us believe that these are eternal, immutable and immovable.