William Roscoe (March 8, 1753-June 27, 1831) was a poet, historian, botanist, and politician who laid the foundation for the cultural flowering of Liverpool while opposing the slave trade, the main source of its prosperity. A prominent member of the Presbyterian (Unitarian) dissenting community, his political and social reform activities were strongly informed by his rational views of religion.…
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (May 16, 1804-January 3, 1894), Mary Tyler Peabody Mann (November 16, 1807-February 11, 1887), and Sophia Amelia Peabody Hawthorne (September 21, 1809-February 26, 1871)—were champions of reform movements, pioneers in modern educational theory, founders of the kindergarten movement in America and supporters of the arts.…
John van Schaick, Jr. (November 18, 1873-May 16, 1949), Universalist parish and Social Gospel minister, was active in war relief in Europe during World War I and was influential as editor of the leading denominational periodical, the Universalist Leader (later renamed the Christian Leader) for nearly a quarter of a century.…
John Bird Wilkins (ca 1849-1938) was a minister, teacher, inventor, and newspaperman. For a year or two he was a Unitarian minister. Little is known of his early life; no birth date, no mother’s name, no father’s name, no school records, and no places of residence.
John Adams (October 30, 1735-July 4, 1826), first vice-president and second president of the United States, was a leader of the American Revolution, diplomat, and political theorist who did much to shape, explain and defend the United States Constitution.
Harry Toulmin (April 7, 1766-November 11, 1823), a Unitarian minister in Britain, emigrated across the Atlantic in search of religious freedom and tolerance. In America he had careers in education, government, and law. As a judge in the turbulent Mississippi Territory, he was able to use his influence to prevent warfare with the Spanish.
user guide test…
Thomas Gibson (September 5, 1777-July 1, 1863) and his only surviving son Thomas Field Gibson (March 3, 1803-December 12, 1889) were prominent silk manufacturers in Spitalfields, in London’s East End, during the industrial revolution. Developing keen interest and influence in political, economic, industrial, and social reform they developed programs to support working people through useful education, improved living conditions, and pastoral care.…
Andrew Yoshinobu Kuroda (December 29, 1906-February 19, 1997), the first an* ordained Unitarian minister of Japanese ancestry in the United States, served the Japanese Unitarian Fellowship at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C. He was also, for thirty-five years, a cataloguer, bibliographer, reference librarian, and head of the Japanese Section at the Library of Congress.
Alphonso Taft (November 5, 1810-May 21, 1891), one of Cincinnati’s most prominent citizens and among Ohio’s most highly regarded 19th-century attorneys and jurists, wrote an influential dissent on Ohio’s “Bible in the Schools Case.” He was the progenitor of a family politically influential in both Ohio and Washington.
Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1923), first First Lady of Czechoslovakia, was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was Rudolph Garrigue, a businessman of Huguenot background whose parents and sister were Unitarian. Her mother was Charlotte Lydia Whiting, whose interest in transcendentalism led her to write to Ralph Waldo Emerson and be in contact with Brook Farm.
Alfred Tredway White (May 28, 1846-January 29, 1921), housing reformer and philanthropist, was known as “the great heart and mastermind of Brooklyn’s better self.” Forty years a deacon and twenty years a trustee of the First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, White’s reforming work in housing grew directly from his church’s social service project and was deeply informed by his sense of religious duty and compassion.