Only known photo of Robert Green Ingersoll addressing an audience, May 30, 1884.

Only known photo of Robert Green Ingersoll addressing an audience, May 30, 1884.

The only known photo of Robert Green Ingersoll addressing an audience at a Thomas Paine memorial gathering at New Rochelle, New York, on May 30, 1884. Photograph commissioned by the freethought newspaper The Truth Seeker.
Estate of Gordon Stein.

L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) a freethinker? Oh yes. Strongly influenced by his freethinker/ suffragist mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage, the Chittenango-born Baum filled his Oz books and other children's fantasies with strong female characters, societies that solve their problems without religion, and godlike figures that merit vigorous skepticism (not to mention a relentless look behind the curtain).

Matilda Joslyn Gage

Matilda Joslyn Gage

Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898) was a lifelong activist: first for abolition, then for woman's rights, and finally for freethought. After 1878 her outspoken criticism of Christianity as woman's oppressor would gradually see her driven from the suffrage movement.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Robert Green Ingersoll

Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) was a true polymath: attorney, patron of the arts, and an incomparable freethought lecturer. In almost three decades of regular touring, he would be seen and heard by more Americans than any other person prior to the advent of motion pictures and radio. His birthplace in Dresden is North America's only freethought museum.

Charles B. Reynolds

Charles B. Reynolds

Charles B. Reynolds (1832–1896) renounced Seventh-day Adventist ministry for freethought circa 1880. In 1882 he began freethought "revival preaching" on stage and in his own freethought "revival tent." In 1886, a mob in Boonton, New Jersey, destroyed his tent. Three months later, nearby Morristown put him on trial for blasphemy. His defense attorney would be none other than Robert Green Ingersoll.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) helped organize the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls that launched the suffrage movement. For decades she led that movement alongside Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Long a freethinker, Stanton only made her heterodox views clear beginning in 1895. By 1898 she had been largely ejected from the suffrage movement, and was able to publish only in freethought periodicals.

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