Free-Thinking, 19th-Century Style

Posted by Wayne Trotta on Dec 2, 2013 in | Comments Off on Free-Thinking, 19th-Century Style Francis Ellingwood Abbot (1836–1903) was nothing if not determined. In 1872, as editor of The Index, the nation’s leading free-thought magazine, he began to muster the full force of his small army of subscribers against what was being called “the God-in-the-Constitution amendment.” A philosopher and theologian, he sought to reconstruct theology in accordance with scientific methodology. From the...
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Those Beautiful Bodies of Yesteryear

Posted by Kershaw Burbank on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Those Beautiful Bodies of Yesteryear On a balmy spring day in 1880, a seventeen-year-old youth from Ire­land’s County Galway arrived at Boston. An orphan with scant formal education, he had spent his meager savings for the transatlantic ship passage. He had neither friends nor close relatives in the United States. He did not even have the promise of a job. But Joseph J. Derham knew he would succeed. America was the golden...
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