Edward Turner (July 28, 1776-January 24, 1853) ranked second only to Hosea Ballou among Universalist ministers of his generation. He was a denominational organizer, a celebrated preacher, and the first historian of Universalism. Close friends for over two decades, Turner and Ballou were alienated after 1815 and were opponents in the Restorationist controversy.
Maria Weston Chapman (July 25, 1806-July 12, 1885) was described by Lydia Maria Child as “One of the most remarkable women of the age.” Chapman and three of her five younger sisters played vital roles in the antislavery movement. Even the smaller Weston girls were pressed into service for the cause that dominated the lives of this family.…
Angus Hector MacLean (May 9, 1892-November 11, 1969), Universalist minister, theological school professor and dean, played a major part in reshaping the philosophy and practice of religious education within the Universalist and Unitarian denominations during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.
Abigail Adams (November 11, 1744-October 28, 1818) advocated and modeled an expanded role for women in public affairs during the formative days of the United States. Married to John Adams, she was an invaluable partner to him as he developed his political career, culminating in the presidency of the United States.
Lydia Maria Child (February 11, 1802-Oct. 20, 1880) was a novelist, editor, journalist and scholar who produced a body of work remarkable for its brilliance, originality and variety, much of it inspired by a strong sense of justice and love of freedom.…
Mary Ashton Rice Livermore (December 19, 1820-May 23, 1905) was a key organizer for the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. Afterwards, she became a leader of the woman suffrage and temperance movements, and a popular lecturer on social reform.…
Richard Hildreth (June 28, 1807-July 11, 1865) was a journalist, philosopher, historian, and antislavery activist. His 1836 novel The Slave is considered the first American antislavery novel. His History of the United States of America broke new ground with its “warts and all” portrayal of the founders of the American republic.…
Lady Frances Russell, who became a Unitarian at 70, and her grandson, Bertrand Russell, Unitarian until age 15, were members of a British family long prominent in reform politics. Although Lady Frances’s husband, Lord John Russell, was never a Unitarian, from 1859-73 he regularly attended the preaching of James Martineau and, in his Whig (Liberal) political career, he had a considerable impact on the history of Unitarianism in Britain.…
Born in Gardner, Massachusetts, Abner was the sixth of ten children of Timothy and Moriah Stone Kneeland. His formal education stopped after a year in an academy in Chesterfield, New Hampshire. At the age of 21 Abner moved, with his older brother Asa, to Dummerston, Vermont in order to follow their father’s carpentry trade.
Adlai Ewing Stevenson (February 5, 1900-July 14, 1965), politician and diplomat, was twice the Democratic Party’s candidate for President of the United States. He brought a freshness, a depth, passion, wit and vision to American politics and to international diplomatic discourse, that illumined an era.
Ezra Ripley (May 1, 1751-September 21, 1841) served as minister of the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts for almost 63 years. Although not himself an intellectual, Ripley possessed extraordinary personal and spiritual authority. He, more than any other, created the religious and moral climate of this small town which nurtured far more than its share of the writers, artists, and political figures—whose names are synonymous with the flowering of the American Renaissance.…
Lydia Ann Moulton Jenkins (1824 or 1825-May 7, 1874) was a leader in the women’s rights movement, a Universalist minister, and later a homeopathic physician. It has been claimed that she was the first woman to be granted ministerial fellowship in the United States, and perhaps the first to be ordained with full denominational authority.…