Download or read book Fifty Years of Free Thought written by George Everett Hussey Macdonald and published by . This book was released on 1931 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fifty Years of Free Thought written by George Everett Hussey Macdonald and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Guided by Reason written by Steven R. Butler and published by . This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Golden Age of Freethought" was an approximately fifty-year-long period, from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of U.S. involvement in the First World War, during which time American atheists and agnostics who called themselves "freethinkers," "liberals," or "infidels," sought to strengthen the "wall of separation between church and state" and to reshape American society by appealing to their fellow-citizens to abandon their religious faith and to embrace a culture of science, reason, and rational thought instead. During this era, in which a vibrant freethought press flourished and "liberal" associations could be found in towns and cities all over the country, Texans were among not only some of the most active and enthusiastic participants but also leaders in the movement. Shortly after one of the first (and perhaps the very first) "liberal" associations in the United States was formed in Bell County in 1873, the respected physician that served as its leader was brutally horse-whipped by Christian zealots who objected to his "infidelity." Undeterred, other groups of "liberals" or "freethinkers," many of them highly respected doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, began meeting regularly in towns and cities all across the Texas, such as Austin, Dallas, Denison, Houston, San Antonio, and Waco, just to name a few. For nearly two decades (1875-1894), there was even a town in East Texas called Ingersoll, named in honor of Robert G. Ingersoll, America's celebrated "Great Agnostic:" lecturer, who toured Texas twice, in 1896 and 1898. Periodically, other prominent freethought lecturers also toured the state. In 1890, the formation of a Texas Liberal Association was spearheaded by one of the movement's foremost freethought publishers, J. D. Shaw of The Independent Pulpit. Other Texas-based freethought publications included Capt. Richard Peterson's Common Sense and Dallas printer John R. Spencer's The Agnostic. Many intelligent, well-read Texans were regular contributors to freethought periodicals. In Guided by Reason: The Golden Age of Freethought in Texas, Steven R. Butler has combined original research with first-hand nineteenth century accounts to narrate the previously untold story of a little known but noteworthy era in Texas history.
Download or read book Freethinkers written by Susan Jacoby and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2005-01-07 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative history of the vital role of secularist thinkers and activists in the United States, from a writer of "fierce intelligence and nimble, unfettered imagination" (The New York Times) At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby paints a striking portrait of more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected accomplishments of secularists who, allied with liberal and tolerant religious believers, have stood at the forefront of the battle for reforms opposed by reactionary forces in the past and today. Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Clarence Darrow—as well as once-famous secularists such as Robert Green Ingersoll, "the Great Agnostic"—Freethinkers restores to history generations of dedicated humanists. It is they, Jacoby shows, who have led the struggle to uphold the combination of secular government and religious liberty that is the glory of the American system.
Download or read book J A Hobson after Fifty Years written by John Pheby and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J.A. Hobson has not always received the attention he deserves. This collection of essays, drawn from the conference to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his death, will go a considerable way in rectifying this situation. This volume contains contributions from many of the leading scholars on Hobson. They are writing on a wide range of subjects from political theory, moral philosophy, imperialism, international relations to economics.
Download or read book The Free Thought Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief written by Tom Flynn and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2007-04-30 with total page 911 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Successor to the highly acclaimed Encyclopedia of Unbelief (1985), edited by the late Gordon Stein, the New Encyclopedia of Unbelief is a comprehensive reference work on the history, beliefs, and thinking of America''s fastest growing minority: those who live without religion. All-new articles by the field''s foremost scholars describe and explain every aspect of atheism, agnosticism, secular humanism, secularism, and religious skepticism. Topics include morality without religion, unbelief in the historicity of Jesus, critiques of intelligent design theory, unbelief and sexual values, and summaries of the state of unbelief around the world.In addition to covering developments since the publication of the original edition, the New Encyclopedia of Unbelief includes a larger number of biographical entries and much-expanded coverage of the linkages between unbelief and social reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, including the labor movement, woman suffrage, anarchism, sex radicalism, and second-wave feminism.More than 130 respected scholars and activists worldwide served on the editorial board and over 100 authoritative contributors have written in excess of 500 entries. The distinguished advisors and contributors--philosophers, scientists, scholars, and Nobel Prize laureates--include Joe Barnhart, David Berman, Sir Hermann Bondi, Vern L. Bullough, Daniel Dennett, Taner Edis, the late Paul Edwards, Antony Flew, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Peter Hare, Van Harvey, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Susan Jacoby, Paul Kurtz, Gerd Lüdemann, Michael Martin, Kai Nielsen, Robert M. Price, Peter Singer, Victor Stenger, Ibn Warraq, George A. Wells, David Tribe, Sherwin Wine, and many others. With a foreword by evolutionary biologist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins, this unparalleled reference work provides comprehensive knowledge about unbelief in its many varieties and manifestations.
Download or read book The Sex Radicals written by Hal D. Sears and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2021-10-29 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides the first account of the pioneering efforts at sex reform in America from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era. Despite the atmosphere of extreme prudery and the existence of the Comstock laws after the Civil War, a group of radicals emerged to attack conventional beliefs about sex, from traditional marriage to women’s chattel status in society. These men and women had in common a direct, unrespectable, iconoclastic style. They put forth outrageous journalism and had a penchant for martyrdom and for using the courts to publicize their ideologies. From rare and generally unknown sources, Hal D. Sears pieced together the story of the sex radicals and their surprising ideas. Moses Harman, a minister turned abolitionist and freethinker, is a central figure in the narrative. His Lucifer, the Light Bearer, the only journal of sexual liberty published from the early 1880s to 1907, was dedicated to free love, sex education, women’s rights, and related causes. To a great degree Harman’s publication defines the limits of social dissent in the late nineteenth century. Other members of the sex radical circle included E. B. Foote, a medical doctor who made a fortune with a home medical book crammed with sex information; Edwin Walker and Lillian Harman, who became a cause célèbre among radicals when their jailhouse honeymoon in Kansas challenged the right of the state to regulate marriage; Elmina Slenker, who promoted a theory of sexual energy sublimation and the idea that women were the superior sex; and Lois Waisbrooker, Dora Forster, Lillie White, and other feminists who, almost a century ago, taught and preached the very ideas we hear today in the women’s movement. Of course, all these people got into trouble with the law, mostly through the machinations of their archvillain, Anthony Comstock. Sears examines Comstock’s powers of postal censorship and describes Comstock’s personal vendettas against sexual dissenters, particularly the free love philosopher Ezra Heywood. He gives a legal history of obscenity and explains the sex radicals’ significance in the emergence of obscenity law. Although the sex radicals attest the important reform vitality of provincial culture in late nineteenth-century America, until now they have been almost ignored by historians. Those who have studied sex radicalism at all, apart from its communitarian and sectarian aspects, have viewed it merely as a subsidiary of the more respectable feminist movement. In this book Sears gives careful consideration to the links between sex radicalism and spiritualism, feminism, anticlericalism, anarchism, and the free-thought movement. He presents sex radicalism as a separate and unique movement which illuminates new reaches of the Victorian landscape and establishes a tradition for present-day liberation trends.
Download or read book D M Bennett the Truth Seeker written by Roderick Bradford and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett (1818-1882) was nineteenth-century America''s most controversial publisher and free-speech martyr. Bennett founded the "blasphemous" New York periodical The Truth Seeker in 1873, and his publications were censored and prohibited from newsstands long before the expression "banned in Boston" was heard. In less than a decade, the former Shaker and self-described Thomas Paine infidel became the most successful publisher of freethought literature in America - perhaps the world. Mark Twain, Clarence Darrow, and Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Great Agnostic," were only a few of the illustrious freethinkers who subscribed to the periodical devoted to "science, morals, freethought and human happiness." But Bennett''s opposition to dogmatic religion and puritanical obscenity laws so infuriated Anthony Comstock, the U.S. Post Office''s "special agent" and self-proclaimed "weeder in God''s garden," that the freethinking publisher was eventually prosecuted, subjected to a controversial and widely publicized trial, and finally imprisoned.Based on original sources and extensively researched, this in-depth yet accessible biography of D.M. Bennett offers a fascinating glimpse into the turbulent period of late nineteenth-century America-the Gilded Age, a time when our nation was controlled by pious politicians, powerful manufacturers, and censorious clergymen. Roderick Bradford follows Bennett''s evolution from a devout Shaker to an unremitting skeptic and America''s most iconoclastic publisher. He details the circumstances that led to Bennett''s historically significant New York obscenity trial and the monumental, though ultimately unsuccessful, petition campaign for a pardon. This was the largest protest of its kind in the nineteenthcentury and one that went all the way to the White House. Bradford also investigates Bennett''s prominent role in the National Liberal League, his interactions with leading suffragists and the National Defense Association (a forerunner of the ACLU), and his flirtation with spiritualism and theosophy.Roderick Bradford has written a valuable historical contribution, a long-overdue tribute to a free-speech champion, and a colorful depiction of memorable characters and events during a period of great change in American history.
Download or read book Separation of Church and State written by Philip Hamburger and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a powerful challenge to conventional wisdom, Philip Hamburger argues that the separation of church and state has no historical foundation in the First Amendment. The detailed evidence assembled here shows that eighteenth-century Americans almost never invoked this principle. Although Thomas Jefferson and others retrospectively claimed that the First Amendment separated church and state, separation became part of American constitutional law only much later. Hamburger shows that separation became a constitutional freedom largely through fear and prejudice. Jefferson supported separation out of hostility to the Federalist clergy of New England. Nativist Protestants (ranging from nineteenth-century Know Nothings to twentieth-century members of the K.K.K.) adopted the principle of separation to restrict the role of Catholics in public life. Gradually, these Protestants were joined by theologically liberal, anti-Christian secularists, who hoped that separation would limit Christianity and all other distinct religions. Eventually, a wide range of men and women called for separation. Almost all of these Americans feared ecclesiastical authority, particularly that of the Catholic Church, and, in response to their fears, they increasingly perceived religious liberty to require a separation of church from state. American religious liberty was thus redefined and even transformed. In the process, the First Amendment was often used as an instrument of intolerance and discrimination.
Download or read book Clarence Darrow written by Andrew E. Kersten and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clarence Darrow is best remembered for his individual cases, whether defending the thrill killers Leopold and Loeb or John Scopes’s right to teach evolution in the classroom. In the first full-length biography of Darrow in decades, the historian Andrew E. Kersten narrates the complete life of America’s most legendary lawyer and the struggle that defined it, the fight for the American traditions of individualism, freedom, and liberty in the face of the country’s inexorable march toward modernity. Prior biographers have all sought to shoehorn Darrow, born in 1857, into a single political party or cause. But his politics do not define his career or enduring importance. Going well beyond the familiar story of the socially conscious lawyer and drawing upon new archival records, Kersten shows Darrow as early modernity’s greatest iconoclast. What defined Darrow was his response to the rising interference by corporations and government in ordinary working Americans’ lives: he zealously dedicated himself to smashing the structures and systems of social control everywhere he went. During a period of enormous transformations encompassing the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, Darrow fought fiercely to preserve individual choice as an ever more corporate America sought to restrict it.
Download or read book Emma Goldman Vol 2 written by Emma Goldman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008-07-16 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique history of one of American radicalism's most fiercely outspoken figures
Download or read book Reasoner Journal of Freethought and Positive Philosophy written by and published by . This book was released on 1854 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Free Thought Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 1886 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony written by Ann D. Gordon and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-10 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “hush” of the title comes suddenly, when first Elizabeth Cady Stanton dies on October 26, 1902, and three years later Susan B. Anthony dies on March 13, 1906. It is sudden because Stanton, despite near blindness and immobility, wrote so intently right to the end that editors had supplies of her articles on hand to publish several months after her death. It is sudden because Anthony, at the age of eighty-five, set off for one more transcontinental trip, telling a friend on the Pacific Coast, “it will be just as well if I come to the end on the cars, or anywhere, as to be at home.” Volume VI of this extraordinary series of selected papers is inescapably about endings, death, and silence. But death happens here to women still in the fight. An Awful Hush is about reformers trained “in the school of anti-slavery” trying to practice their craft in the age of Jim Crow and a new American Empire. It recounts new challenges to “an aristocracy of sex,” whether among the bishops of the Episcopal church, the voters of California, or the trustees of the University of Rochester. And it sends last messages about woman suffrage. As Stanton wrote to Theodore Roosevelt on the day before she died, “Surely there is no greater monopoly than that of all men, in denying to all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey.” With the publication of Volume VI, this series is now complete.
Download or read book A Short History of Freethought written by John M. Robertson and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: A Short History of Freethought by John M. Robertson
Download or read book A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern written by John Mackinnon Robertson and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
