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Online Library of Liberty The OLL is a curated collection of scholarly works that engage with vital questions of liberty.

Spanning the centuries from Hammurabi to Hume, and collecting material on topics from art and economics to law and political theory, the OLL provides you with a rich variety of texts to explore and consider.

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The Reading Room

The OLL blog explores the fascinating, vital, and often surprising texts and people that fill our library. Come talk in our library!

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Liberty Matters

The OLL brings people together to debate and discuss important texts and big ideas about liberty.

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Liberty Matters: A Forum for the Discussion of Ideas About Liberty Why History Matters for 21st Century Liberty

We invited John Hulsman to write this month’s Liberty Matters essay, “Why History Matters for 21st Century Liberty” because we had been following his coverage of the war in Ukraine. The coverage was insightful and accurate, but we were particularly drawn to it because it was always deeply seated in historical context. Whether it drew from the specific military and political histories of Russia ...

Explore the OLL Collection: Quotations About Liberty and Power Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation

On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Its limited scope, freeing slaves only in those states “in rebellion against the United States,” did not satisfy abolitionists but did infuriate many in the North who were pro-Union but not anti-slavery.

Explore the OLL Collection: Images of Liberty and Power Art of the Levellers

The Leveller Tracts had some very interesting title pages which used typography and occasionally woodcuts to add graphical force to the political and economic arguments being made by the authors. The pamphlets were published in their thousands during the 1640s and 1650s - the London bookseller George Thomason collected 23,000 of them over a period of twenty years and these comprise a major coll...