A biography that restores America's foremost nineteenth-century champion of reason and secularism to our still contested twenty-first-century public square 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 vigor unmatched since America's revolutionary generation. When he died in 1899, even his religious enemies acknowledged that he might have aspired to the U.S. 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, the 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 one of the indispensable public figures who keep an alternative version of history alive. He devoted his life to that greatest secular idea of all-liberty of conscience belonging to the religious and nonreligious alike.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Yale University Press
ISBN-13
9780300205787
eBay Product ID (ePID)
208742802
Product Key Features
Book Title
The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought
Author
Susan Jacoby
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Publication Year
2014
Genre
Biographies & True Stories
Number of Pages
256 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
202mm
Item Width
132mm
Item Weight
282g
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Susan Jacoby
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States
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