Daniel Shays' Legacy? Marshall Bloom, Radical Insurgency & the Pioneer Valley

“A little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to his good friend James Madison in 1787, upon hearing the news of Shays’ Rebellion. This is the story of how that little rebellion, largely centered in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, became part of the cultural legacy Marshall Bloom inherited when he founded the Montague Farm in 1968. The Amherst College graduate, underground journalist and Movement wunderkind revived Daniel Shays’ spirit, stirred in some theater of the absurd, and planted the seeds that blossomed into one of the most concentrated centers of cultural and political radicalism in America.