Acknowledgements and Notes
Acknowledgements
I would not have been able to do the research for this book were it not for the tools now available on the Internet. Each of these tools represents the hard work and generosity (or occasionally the hopeful business model) of helpful people. I want to thank in particular Google for its searchable news and books archives, its automated translation service, and its search engine. Thanks also to Wikipedia for making it easier to follow leads, to PBworks for the wiki tool I used to organize my notes, and to media archives like Internet Archive, Making of America, Old Fulton New York, PapersPast, Chronicling America, Friends Journal, Missouri Digital Heritage, and Trove for enabling me to search through the first draft of history.
I did not consciously pattern this book on the nonviolent action scholarship of Gene Sharp, but I was certainly influenced by his books, particularly his volume on The Methods of Nonviolent Action (1973) which describes a variety of resistance tactics in a similar way.
I am grateful to Jason Rawn and to Claire Wolfe for looking over my drafts and giving me the benefit of their helpful criticism.
Thanks also to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (U.S.) for sending me to the 14th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns in Bogotá, Colombia, where I delivered the talk that developed into this book. I am grateful also to the conference hosts, Acción Colectiva de Objetores y Objetoras de Conciencia.
Open source coders who contributed to the Astro and Starlight projects (and the various libraries and tools they rely on) enabled me to turn this book into a website gracefully.
Notes
This is not meant to be a book of rigorous history. Some of the incidents I describe as examples are based on single accounts, written by possibly biased or careless reporters. In many cases it has not been possible to verify the stories with additional research, and in other cases I have been content not to look much further. Inevitably some exaggerations and possibly outright fictions have found their way into this book.
I was able to find much more in American and Australian news archives than in those of other countries. This is partially because the state of the Internet when I was researching made such sources more available and easily searchable, but also because English is the only language in which I’m fluent. The next person to follow the trail I’ve been on will surely find many interesting byways I missed.
While I researched this book, I blogged about what I was finding. My blog “The Picket Line” has a good subject-matter index, so if you find some lead in this book that you would like to follow further, that would be a good place to start.