Liberty Tree’s major work in 2006 employed local democracy to develop a new program area, Democratizing Defense. Liberty Tree provided legal, media, and other key strategic support to organizers in Wisconsin, Illinois, Massachusetts, and California who wanted to bring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan home by placing anti-war ballot measures on municipal, town, and county ballots.

The Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution incorporated in the summer of 2004 and went public in 2005 with the launch of its first website and quarterly journal. The following timeline gives highlights of some of the major developments and accomplishments of Liberty Tree in its work to “build a democracy movement for the U.S.A..”

The first, famous Liberty Tree stood on the Boston Common, an American Elm with a political history. The elm was a commons tree in the pre-Norman ‘English borough’ tradition: A place for the people of the shire to gather on their own terms and for their own purposes.

In the decade of agitation that fed into the American Revolution, Boston radicals rallied beneath the tree’s canopy, speaking against imperial authorities and calling for home rule in the colonies.