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The article discusses manuscript sources in American radicalism. Scholars interested in American radicalism must be prepared to travel widely if they expect to inspect manuscript sources. Virtually every state, almost every university library of any stature, has some such holdings. Socialists, and other radicals, were prolific writers of letters, memoranda, speeches and pamphlets. They also tended to keep extensive minutes of meetings of branches, committees, national boards, and even of factions. Moreover, most Socialists had a sense of history and preserved their records. Unfortunately, there is no single repository for this Socialist material. At one time it was expected that the Tamiment Institute-then called the Rand School-Library in New York would house the material. But Socialists, in the course of human events, split into innumerable factions, and the leaders of different factions gave their papers to various libraries some of them thousands of miles apart. There were also geographic reasons for the dispersion: the early Socialists of the Nineteenth century lived in Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, and (after 1880) California.

The article presents an extract from a private diary kept by an intelligent and scholarly young carpenter living in New England and New York from September 1820 to May 1827. Carpenters having frequently discussed upon the impropriety of working so many hours during the longest days in summer, for a day's work and on the necessity and expediency of limiting the number of hours for a day's work, thereby reducing it to a regular system whereby every mechanick might be enabled to work the exact specified time for his employer and yet have some leisure time to regulate and make such arrangements in his affairs as are indispensably necessary. The first step taken to effect this was notice given in the public papers that a meeting of the journeymen carpenters would be held at Concert Hall, on April 12, 1825 and solicited punctual attendance. This notice was given about ten days previous to the proposed meeting. Five or six days before the meeting about sixty or seventy of the above named met to consult what measures to adopt at the general meeting and make such arrangements for the same as might be thought proper.