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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Isabel Darlington, Esq., Belle of the Bar

On a crisp day in late December 1897, the members of the Chester County Bar Association gathered on the front steps of the courthouse in West Chester for their annual group portrait. Three dozen lawyers posed solemnly before the camera, each mustachioed face a mirror image of the next. For the first time in its one hundred and fifty year history, there was something notice­ably different about...
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