Harriet Martineau (June 12, 1802-June 27, 1876), a pioneering British journalist and writer, grew up Unitarian and was for a time a Unitarian apologist. A free trade advocate, she provided influential support for economic reform in Britain. The observational methodology she developed traveling in America was a forerunner of modern sociology.
Vincent Brown Silliman (June 29, 1894-February 2, 1979), a Unitarian minister, poet, hymn writer and worship arts specialist was born to parents Dwight and Frances Silliman in Hudson, Wisconsin in 1894. His father, a physician, had five children from an earlier marriage.…
Arthur Foote (March 5, 1853-April 4, 1937), Unitarian church musician and influential music teacher, was a leading member of a group of composers known as the Boston Six or the Second New England School. Together, the Six-John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, Amy Beach, and Arthur Foote-wrote the first substantial body of indigenous concert hall, or “classical,” music in America.
William Vidler (May 4, 1758-August 23, 1816), a British Universalist and Unitarian preacher and publisher, was a disciple and colleague of Elhanan Winchester. Together with Unitarian missionary Richard Wright, Vidler played a significant role in establishing institutional features British Unitarians continue to use.…
Thomas Aikenhead (baptised March 28, 1676-January 8, 1697), a young Edinburgh medical student who allegedly railed against the Holy Trinity, was judicially hanged for his offence on January 8, 1697. His execution, which raised considerable concern, was the last execution for blasphemy in Britain.…
Hosea Ballou (April 30, 1771-June 7, 1852) was the most influential of the preachers in the second generation of the Universalist movement. His book, A Treatise on Atonement, radically altered the thinking of his colleagues in the ministry and their congregations.
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743-July 4, 1826) is known the world over as the principal author, in 1776 at age 33, of the Declaration of Independence; as author of the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom instituting separation of church and state in Virginia, passed in 1786; and as third president of the United States, 1801-09.…
Frances Wayland Wood (February 13, 1903-August 22, 1975) was a lay professional who dedicated her life to liberal religious education. She helped to renovate Unitarian Sunday School materials in the mid-twentieth century and worked as consultant to Unitarian churches across North America.
Abigail Adams Eliot (October 9, 1892-October 29, 1992) was a pioneer of the nursery school movement. She is best known for her work with young children and in teaching other people to work with young children.
As her name suggests, she was a member of two of the most illustrious Unitarian families of New England: the Adamses and the Eliots.
Samuel Barrett (August 16, 1795-June 24, 1866) was an active and much respected Unitarian minister in the early days of the organized American Unitarian movement.
Young Samuel’s family belonged to the Congregational Society in Wilton, New Hampshire. Their minister was the liberal preacher Thomas Beede, who had been a classmate of William Ellery Channing at Harvard.…
Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759-September 10, 1797), a revolutionary advocate of equal rights for women, was an inspiration for both the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century women’s movements. Wollstonecraft was not merely a woman’s rights advocate. She asserted the innate rights of all people, whom she thought victims of a society that assigned people their roles, comforts, and satisfactions according to the false distinctions of class, age, and gender.…
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Norbert Fabián Čapek (1870-1942), a Czechoslovak minister of extraordinary ability, after spending a few years in the United States, returned in 1921 to his native country to found and build in Prague what soon became the largest Unitarian church in the world as well as a vigorous new Unitarian movement across the land.…