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D.M. Bennett, the Truth Seeker
Author: Roderick Bradford
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2010-10-04
Total Pages: 412
ISBN-13: 1615926526
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Truth Seeker
Author: Cecilia Dominic
Publisher: AIBHS
Published: 2018-05-15
Total Pages: 121
ISBN-13: 1945074337
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An immortal on a mission. A man trapped in a labyrinth. Can she control the maze before their world crumbles? Maggie has grown weary of outliving everything she knows and loves. Numb to her job as a supernatural detective, she vows her next mission will be her last. But when the case alerts her to an enchanted series of tunnels, saving the mortal trapped in its mystical network may be the least of her troubles. Philippe was ready for a new line of work when a magical coffee bean whisked him halfway across all of creation. Desperate to stay alive in a world the roadie doesn’t understand, laying eyes on his beautiful savior Maggie gives him extra motivation to survive. If only he can avoid doing something stupid that destroys all of humanity… With a reckless mortal in tow, Maggie’s unsure she can prevent the dark-roasted portals from unleashing a hellishly destructive evil. Can the roadie and the immortal defeat the builders of the passages in time to save the world? Truth Seeker is the first book in the imaginative Dream Weavers and Truth Seekers urban fantasy series. If you like mythical realms, startling twists, and a hint of paranormal romance, then you’ll love Cecilia Dominic’s supernatural adventure. Buy Truth Seeker to caffeinate your imagination today!
Village Atheists
Author: Leigh Eric Schmidt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-12-18
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 0691183112
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A compelling history of atheism in American public life A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation’s moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a nation chosen by God. Yet village atheists—as these godless freethinkers came to be known by the close of the nineteenth century—were also hailed for their gutsy dissent from stultifying pieties and for posing a necessary secularist challenge to the entanglements of church and state. In Village Atheists, Leigh Eric Schmidt explores the complex cultural terrain that unbelievers have long had to navigate in their fight to secure equal rights and liberties in American public life. He rebuilds the history of American secularism from the ground up, giving flesh and blood to these outspoken infidels. Village Atheists demonstrates that the secularist vision for the United States proved to be anything but triumphant in a country where faith and citizenship were—and still are—closely interwoven.
The Truth Seeker
The Church of Saint Thomas Paine
Author: Leigh Eric Schmidt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-11-02
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 0691217254
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The forgotten story of the nineteenth-century freethinkers and twentieth-century humanists who tried to build their own secular religion In The Church of Saint Thomas Paine, Leigh Eric Schmidt tells the surprising story of how freethinking liberals in nineteenth-century America promoted a secular religion of humanity centered on the deistic revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and how their descendants eventually became embroiled in the culture wars of the late twentieth century. After Paine’s remains were stolen from his grave in New Rochelle, New York, and shipped to England in 1819, the reverence of his American disciples took a material turn in a long search for his relics. Paine’s birthday was always a red-letter day for these believers in democratic cosmopolitanism and philanthropic benevolence, but they expanded their program to include a broader array of rites and ceremonies, particularly funerals free of Christian supervision. They also worked to establish their own churches and congregations in which to practice their religion of secularism. All of these activities raised serious questions about the very definition of religion and whether it included nontheistic fellowships and humanistic associations—a dispute that erupted again in the second half of the twentieth century. As right-wing Christians came to see secular humanism as the most dangerous religion imaginable, small communities of religious humanists, the heirs of Paine’s followers, were swept up in new battles about religion’s public contours and secularism’s moral perils. An engrossing account of an important but little-known chapter in American history, The Church of Saint Thomas Paine reveals why the lines between religion and secularism are often much blurrier than we imagine.
Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy
Author: Christopher Grasso
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 545
ISBN-13: 019754732X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Teacher, preacher, soldier, spy: the civil wars of John R. Kelso is an account of an extraordinary nineteenth-century American life. A schoolteacher and Methodist preacher in Missouri, in the Civil War Kelso earned fame fighting rebel guerrillas. Seeking personal revenge as well as defending the Union, he vowed to slay twenty-five rebels with his own hand, and when he did so he was elected to Congress. In the House of Representatives during Reconstruction, he was one of the first to call for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. After his term in Congress, personal tragedy drove him west, where he became a freethinking lecturer and author, an atheist, a Spiritualist, and, before his death in 1891, an anarchist. John R. Kelso was many things. He was also a strong-willed son, a passionate husband, and a loving and grieving father. The Civil War remained central to his life, challenging his notions of manhood and honor, his ideals of liberty and equality, and his beliefs about politics, religion, morality, and human nature. Throughout his life, too, he fought private wars-not only against former friends and alienated family members, rebellious students and disaffected church congregations, political opponents and religious critics, but also against the warring impulses in his own complex character. His life story moreover, offers a unique vantage upon dimensions of nineteenth-century American culture that are usually treated separately: religious revivalism and political anarchism; sex, divorce, and Civil War battles; freethinking and the Wild West"--
The Truth-seeker in philosophy, literature, and religion, ed. by F.R. Lees and G.S. Phillips. [Continued as] The Truth-seeker and present age
Author: Truth-seeker and present age
Publisher:
Published: 1850
Total Pages: 478
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief
Author: Tom Flynn
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2007-04-30
Total Pages: 911
ISBN-13: 1615922806
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Race in a Godless World
Author: Nathan G. Alexander
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-09-16
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 1526142392
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Is modern racism a product of secularisation and the decline of Christian universalism? The debate has raged for decades, but up to now, the actual racial views of historical atheists and freethinkers have never been subjected to a systematic analysis. Race in a Godless World sets out to correct the oversight. It centres on Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when popular atheist movements were emerging and scepticism about the truth of Christianity was becoming widespread. Covering racial and evolutionary science, imperialism, slavery and racial prejudice in theory and practice, it provides a much-needed account of the complex and sometimes contradictory ideas espoused by the transatlantic community of atheists and freethinkers. It also reflects on the social dimension of irreligiousness, exploring how working-class atheists’ experiences of exclusion could make them sympathetic to other marginalised groups.
