The AA History Lovers webgroup has over 2,500 members from all over the earth including the United States, Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Mexico, Belgium, the Scandinavian countries, Australia, and India, to name just a few of these far flung lands. But the actual number of people who are affected by the webgroup is far higher. There are many who read the group’s postings on a regular basis without having signed up on the membership list, since anyone who has a computer and access to the internet can read all the messages. Enrolling on the membership list is only necessary for posting messages. And many of the group’s readers forward some of the postings on to their friends, or reprint their contents in local AA newsletters, or put up copies on their own websites.
95% of the people who have authored the best books on AA history are members of the AAHistoryLovers, as are 95% of the top archivists, rare book specialists and other historical researchers in the field. In addition, over the years, the Archivists at the Alcoholics Anonymous GSO in New York City have also regularly been a member of the AAHistoryLovers, although because of their position, they have usually refrained from public comments on the postings.
So the AAHistoryLovers has gained a reputation as the most dependable single source of historical information about AA. If you want to find out what the real experts say — the most knowledgeable and competent scholars and researchers in the field — the AAHistoryLovers will give you the best-documented and most up-to-date information known. And it will also be one of the first places to publish news about newly discovered documents and facts, along with notices of the most recent publications on AA history.
One of the world’s largest archives
of AA historical material
The collected messages of the AAHistoryLovers forms one of the largest single bodies of good AA historical material gathered in one place, an incredible accomplishment carried out by a number of the world’s best AA historians and archivists. All the messages from the first eleven years (2002-2012) have now been gathered together into computer files which can either be downloaded or read on line.
Here at the end of 2012 we are getting close to the end of the line, in terms of people who knew the original founders of AA at first hand. In fact, the AAHL was started in large part as a last-ditch effort to glean as much information as possible from these people while we could still sit at their feet and listen to them talk, and ask questions. The next generation will be forced to rely solely on documents and audio recordings.
(From the administrator of silkworth.net, Jim M. The files below are very large files. The links below are all the messages from AA History Lovers from 2002 thru 2012. When you access any of the files below, USE YOUR BROWSERS SEARCH FEATURE in Text, PDF, MS Word and HTML to locate information you seek. Use KEY WORDS such as, phrases, titles, parts of titles, persons name, etc . . . to locate that which you seek. Please be patient while any of the pages below load as they are very large files.)
feeling what Bill Wilson experienced back in 1918 when he was a
young artillery officer: the primordial awareness of the sacred and
the holy, that sense of contact with a fourth dimension of existence
which lay at the heart of his spirituality.
TWELFTH ANNIVERSARY
March 16, 2000 – March 16, 2012
But in Spring 2002, Nancy changed her e-mail to another provider, and then discovered to her horror (a) that the Yahoo group system would not recognize her new e-mail address, and (b) that her old e-mail provider would not give her that old address back. So no one could any longer gain access to the management section of the Buffs, and keep the group operating properly.
So she started the AAHistoryLovers, and then she — along with Fiona Dodd, of County Mayo in Ireland, who has done an extraordinary amount of work on the AAHistoryLovers over the years — selected the most important Buffs messages, and copied and pasted them into Lovers messages.
Nancy Olson was the chief aide in charge of alcoholism legislation in the U.S. Senate for ten years (1970-1980), during which time she shepharded the Hughes Act through Congress, along with many other major pieces of federal legislation on alcoholism and drug addiction. Her book about those years, With a Lot of Help from Our Friends: The Politics of Alcoholism, is still the major historical account of this decade, which ranks up with the prohibition era as one of the two most important periods of alcoholism legislation in American history. For an account of her long and adventurous life, see:
1951-55 secretary and aide to Mortimer J. Adler, who was the famous co-editor of the Chicago Great Books series.
Actress at the Pasadena Playhouse, traveling the Caribbean with a British banker, then entering the A.A. program in 1965. Then back in Chicago in August of 1968, while serving as a volunteer for the Democratic National Committee at the Democratic National Convention, she met Senator Harold Hughes from Iowa and eventually became his chief aide for alcoholism legislation. In 1970 she gave it all up, and left Washington D.C. to become a nun. She had to give this up when her legs became crippled by multiple sclerosis — but then she was almost completely cured by a miracle at one of the great healing shrines in Europe, and was able to go back to Washington, where she had a very active and successful career as a legislative analyst and lobbyist until her retirement in 1995.
The Golden Apples of the Sun: Her first AA meeting and how she first met Senator Harold Hughes.
Nancy remembers Mortimer Adler.
Our present work on
archiving all this material
A program called PG Offline has just been used to download all of the first eleven years of AAHistoryLovers messages, from 2002 to 2012. They were downloaded in tabular form as Microsoft Access data files. Mail merge was then used to transfer this tabular data to continuous MS Word files, producing ten MS Word documents, one per year, each one around a thousand or so pages long.
Unfortunately, these messages were still full of the kind of web page coding used for HTML files and other similar online documents, to such a point that many sections were nearly totally unreadable. So another program, called Detagger, then had to be used to strip all of this HTML coding out of the messages.
These documents are still extremely lengthy, and sometimes have the lines broken up in ways that makes them difficult to read. This is the result of literally tens of thousands of extraneous line breaks, which will have to be removed by hand. But once this has been done, these documents should be only about half as long in terms of number of pages, and far easier to read.
The important thing is that they have now been preserved for posterity in a form that will be useful to those future generations. I earnestly hope that the major AA archives all around the world will download these files and store them on a CD disk or some other permanent storage device, to help make sure that later centuries will still be able to read and use this material.
G.C., moderator of the AAHL
January 21, 2013
(All of the above information was presented by Glenn C., Moderator of the Yahoo Group, AA History Lovers. All of the above that has been reprinted here is from the Web site of The Hindsfoot Foundation.)
Click the message number to open the relevant PDF file or download using the required format. The files are massive in size, please give them some time to load if you are on a slow Internet connection.