Early American Blogging, sort of

Food for thought about blogging:
Blogging in the Early Republic: Why bloggers belong in the history of reading by W. Caleb McDaniel [at common-place.org]

Henry Clarke Wright was an antebellum American reformer whose eclectic interests ranged from antislavery to radical pacifism to health reform and beyond. Born in 1797 and educated as a minister, he later abandoned institutional religion and became a prolific writer and speaker.

[snip]

As a writer with grand aspirations for shaking the world, Wright was also an inveterate journal keeper. For most of his adult life, he filled a steady stream of over one hundred diaries. In these, comments on world events and social reform jostle with reflections on the diarist’s loveless marriage and his struggle for faith. While private, the journals were also public. Wright mailed pages and even whole volumes to his friends or read them excerpts from the diaries, and many pages were later published in his numerous books. Thus, as his biographer Lewis Perry notes, in the case of Wright, "distinctions between private and public, between diaries and published writings, meant little."

Blogs are not merely a new form of political pamphleteering -- the impression you may get from some of the mainstream media coverage, since the most visible blogs are political. Blogs are too diverse to try to confine into that box -- but I'm not sure what the purpose they serve. For me, this blog is just a way to remember and possibly share some 'stuff' with like-minded folks.

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988