There was–perhaps still is–a Cuban aphorism that “Sugar is made with blood.” Few other people were better situated to actually comment on what went into producing sugar (consumed all the way from England to India) than those whose labor created it. None knew more intimately than the slave just how much human misery was squeezed into every cup. Sugar and tobacco were the New World’s primary cash crops because their stimulating and addictive chemistries gave European aristocrats incredible amounts of wealth and power. Factory workers dumped sugar into their tea to up calorie counts and make it through the day while corporatists and slave masters reaped a harvest of stimulated profits. The slave’s blood fed the production of cane, and cane fed the new generations of drudge workers. Sugar, in many regards, was made with blood, and history is much the same. But to find out just how sanguine our cup is, we have to be willing to ask disturbing questions. To enjoy tales about the good times and the pleasant things, the heroes and victories, we have to be direct and honest about our past.

Libertarianism.org’s newest podcast, Liberty Chronicles, will present listeners with a humane history of Liberty and Power, neither romanticizing the present nor failing to bluntly analyze the past. The saga of human history is incredibly painful and, often, not terribly inspirational. In many ways, it is a long train of cautionary tales each of which has failed to adequately instruct successive generations. Despite the constant stream of evidence that prosperity requires peaceful cooperation, we consistently fail to improve ourselves. We ignore our true histories–the painful catalog of who exercised violence against whom–to tell myths that temporarily bandage any serious wounds.

To understand more fully who did what to whom and why, we have to be willing to jettison our preconceived notions about the world we know and love. We have to stop trying to justify history and begin really listening to its record. We have to break from the nationalistic, hopeful narratives of an ever-improving synthesis and recognize that the past offers us no nice, neat little lessons or predetermined end-points. Having done these ideological exercises, we can commit ourselves to exploring the past from the perspectives of those actual human beings who created and lived it. With a bit of practice, we can start training ourselves to practice empathy and sympathy by straining to understand people so radically different from ourselves.

Liberty Chronicles combines libertarian methodology with a variety of historical theories and perspectives. We will help listeners eschew academic gatekeepers and propagandizers, taking up Carl Becker’s famous invitation that “Everyman” become “His Own Historian.” We begin today with a discussion of H.L. Mencken’s history of the bathtub and over the next several weeks we will broaden our ideological toolkit to prepare for investigations of our own. Having covered history from above, history from below, Marxism vs. Classical Liberalism, methodological individualism, and conspiracy theory, we will move to the Early Modern period and the development of Liberty and Power in colonial America. From there and then, the battle between those seeking liberty and those seeking power has remained an open contest. Subscribe on your favorite podcatcher, add us on Facebook and Twitter, send us your questions, share the news far and wide all across the land! The history of libertarianism and its war on power is more relevant and necessary now than perhaps ever before.