Humanly Possible
Humanly Possible

Author: Sarah Bakewell

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2024-03-26

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0735274320

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The bestselling, prizewinning author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café explores 700 years of writers, thinkers, scientists and artists, all trying to understand what it means to be truly human. If you are reading this, it’s likely you already have some affinity with humanism, even if you don’t think of yourself in those terms. You may be drawn to literature and the humanities. You may prefer to base your moral choices on fellow-feeling and responsibility to others rather than on religious commandments. Or you may simply believe that individual lives are more important than grand political visions or dogmas. If any of these apply, you are part of a long tradition of humanist thought, and you share that tradition with many extraordinary individuals through history who have put rational enquiry, cultural richness, freedom of thought and a sense of hope at the heart of their lives. Humanly Possible introduces us to some of these people, as it asks what humanism is and why it has flourished for so long, despite opposition from fanatics, mystics and tyrants. It is a book brimming with ideas, personalities and experiments in living – from the literary enthusiasts of the fourteenth century to the secular campaigners of our own time, from Erasmus to Esperanto, from anatomists to agnostics, from Christine de Pizan to Bertrand Russell, and from Voltaire to Zora Neale Hurston. It takes us on an irresistible journey, and joyfully celebrates open-mindedness, optimism, freedom and the power of the here and now—humanist values which have helped steer us through dark times in the past, and which are just as urgently needed in our world today. The bestselling, prizewinning author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café explores 700 years of writers, thinkers, scientists and artists, all trying to understand what it means to be truly human.

The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

Author: Robert Green Ingersoll

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2018-05-23

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 3732692183

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reproduction of the original: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll by Robert Green Ingersoll

Royal Bob
Royal Bob

Author: Dr. C. H. Cramer

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2018-02-27

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1787209423

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A scholarly biography of the great agnostic and freethought pioneer Robert Ingersoll. “ARDENT FRIENDS compared [Robert Green Ingersoll] to Shakespeare and Lincoln. Bitter enemies wanted to transport him to the South Seas. Walt Whitman thought he was sent by heaven to save the race from itself. Worried opponents said the Devil had dispatched him to carry on the work of antichrist on earth. “The name of Robert Green Ingersoll was as well known in most American homes as the captains and the kings of his day. As a Republican he was the Big Voice of the party. As a lawyer he was frequently able to bend juries to his will. As an orator he amused, informed or disquieted auditors in almost every state in the Union. As a rationalist he preached salvation through science. “A half century after his death it is possible to look at Ingersoll in a perspective which has become more distinct with the passage of time...” (C. H. Cramer)

The Great Agnostic
The Great Agnostic

Author: Susan Jacoby

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2013-01-08

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0300188927

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“Jacoby writes with wit and vigor, affectionately resurrecting a man whose life and work are due for reconsideration” (The Boston Globe). During the Gilded Age, which saw the dawn of America’s enduring culture wars, Robert Green Ingersoll was known as “the Great Agnostic.” The nation’s most famous orator, he raised his voice on behalf of Enlightenment reason, secularism, and the separation of church and state with a power unmatched since America’s revolutionary generation. When he died in 1899, even his religious enemies acknowledged that he might have aspired to the US presidency had he been willing to mask his opposition to religion. To the question that retains its controversial power today—was the United States founded as a Christian nation?—Ingersoll answered an emphatic no. In this provocative biography, Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, restores Ingersoll to his rightful place in an American intellectual tradition extending from Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine to the current generation of “new atheists.” Jacoby illuminates the ways in which America’s often-denigrated and forgotten secular history encompasses issues, ranging from women’s rights to evolution, as potent and divisive today as they were in Ingersoll’s time. Ingersoll emerges in this portrait as an indispensable public figure who devoted his life to that greatest secular idea of all—liberty of conscience belonging to the religious and nonreligious alike. “Jacoby’s goal of elucidating the life and work of Robert Ingersoll is admirably accomplished. She offers a host of well-chosen quotations from his work, and she deftly displays the effect he had on others. For instance: after a young Eugene V. Debs heard Ingersoll talk, Debs accompanied him to the train station and then—just so he could continue the conversation—bought himself a ticket and rode all the way from Terre Haute to Cincinnati. Readers today may well find Ingersoll’s company equally entrancing.” —Jennifer Michael Hecht, The New York Times Book Review

Reminiscences of an Active Life
Reminiscences of an Active Life

Author: John Roy Lynch

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2010-06-17

Total Pages: 574

ISBN-13: 1496800419

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation, John Roy Lynch (1847–1939) came to adulthood during the Reconstruction Era and lived a public-spirited life for over three decades. His political career began in 1869 with his appointment as justice of the peace. Within the year, he was elected to the Mississippi legislature and was later elected Speaker of the House. At age twenty-five, Lynch became the first African American from Mississippi to be elected to the United States Congress. He led the fight to secure passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1875. In 1884, he was elected temporary chairman of the Eighth Republican National Convention and was the first black American to deliver the keynote address. His autobiography, Reminiscences of an Active Life, reflects Lynch's thoughtful and nuanced understanding of the past and of his own experience. The book, written when he was ninety, challenges a number of traditional arguments about Reconstruction. In his experience, African Americans in the South competed on an equal basis with whites; the state governments were responsive to the needs of the people; and race was not always a decisive factor in the politics of Reconstruction. The autobiography, which would not be published until 1970, provides rich material for the study of American politics and race relations during Reconstruction. It sheds light on presidential patronage, congressional deals, and personality conflicts among national political figures. Lynch's childhood reflections reveal new dimensions to our understanding of black experience during slavery and beyond. An introduction by John Hope Franklin puts Lynch's public and private lives in the context of his times and provides an overview of how Reminiscences of an Active Life came to be written.