Jerzy (George) Niemirycz (1612-1659) was an ambitious Arian nobleman and statesman in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. During his later life the Commonwealth, which included the Ukraine, was nearly destroyed by Cossack revolt and Russian and Swedish invasion (a disastrous period in Polish history known as “The Deluge”).…
Paul Nathaniel Carnes (February 1, 1921-March 17, 1979), a longtime minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, New York and a proponent of desegregation and civil liberties, was the third president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), 1977-79.
Paul was born in Jeffersonville, Indiana to Charles O.…
Vilhjalmur Stefansson (November 3, 1879-August 26, 1962), an anthropologist, explorer, book collector, and writer, was an authority on polar regions. At one time a student for the Unitarian ministry, he spent his life as an evangelist for the North. His message was that the Arctic was not a peripheral frozen wasteland populated by savages, but the center of the earth—the “Polar Mediterranean,” he called it—where America, Europe, and Asia come together.…
Albert Rhys Williams (Sept 28, 1883-Feb 27, 1962), a labor organizer and journalist, was a witness to and a participant in the Russian Revolution of October 1917. He was a friend of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and American Communist writer John Reed.
Peter Humphries Clark (March 29, 1829-June 21, 1925), an associate of Frederick Douglass, was one of Ohio’s most effective black abolitionist writers and speakers. The first teacher engaged by the Cincinnati black public schools and founder and principal of Ohio’s first public high school for black students, he was recognized as the nation’s foremost black public school educator.…
Walter Channing (April 15, 1786-July 20, 1876) was born, in Newport, Rhode Island, into a prestigious family. He earned his own reputation as Boston’s leading obstetrician, the first Professor of Midwifery at Harvard Medical School, and the first American physician to advocate the use of anesthesia in childbirth.…
Caroline Evans Veatch (April 17, 1870-October 4, 1953) was a modest widow who, because she was homebound, was never able to attend the Unitarian society she joined late in life. Her bequest transformed the congregation that inspired her and has sustained both the Unitarian Universalist Association and many other UU organizations.
Eliza Tupper Wilkes (October 8, 1844-February 5, 1917) was a circuit-riding preacher who started eleven Universalist and Unitarian churches in the American West. Among the first women ordained into the ministry, Wilkes worked with and mentored other liberal women ministers in the West.…
Peter Cooper (February 12, 1791-April 4, 1883), Unitarian inventor, entrepreneur, and college founder, was a real-life “rags to riches” hero whose love for humanity and deep religious convictions led him to establish the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the first postsecondary institution in the United States to provide free education to the poor and to adults, including women.…
Rhys Williams (February 27, 1929-July 20, 2003), minister of the First Church in Boston for forty years, was a civic leader, active in the establishment and promotion of institutions for education, housing, and the care of the sick and elderly.
Rhys was born in San Francisco, California to Lucita Squier and Albert Rhys Williams.…
John Hassler Dietrich (1878-1957), minister for almost a quarter of a century at the First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was among the first Unitarian ministers to boldly preach that humanist thinking was the true foundation of religious liberalism.
Curtis Williford Reese (September 3, 1887-June 5, 1961) was an educator, administrator, social activist, journalist, and Unitarian minister. He was a founder and president of the American Humanist Association, Secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference (WUC), and Dean of the Abraham Lincoln Centre, an integrated social and educational community organization in Chicago.