This is an outline and some chapters and notes for a book about the history of humanism and freethought.
Decades ago, I worked hard on this and intended some day to publish. Now I highly doubt if I will ever finish. I have a pile of other projects that are more important to me.
Virtually all of this work is about European and American humanism and freethought. This is not to suggest that people and cultures of other regions did not contribute to these movements. Quite the opposite is true.
If anyone else would like to use this material, expand on the book, or just study it, feel free. All I ask is to be acknowledged.
1. Humanism in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Scholasticism: Philosophy Reenters Europe
3. Renaissance humanism: Return of the classics
4. Erasmus and the Oxford Reformers
8. Early Pantheism: Bruno, Vanini and Spinoza
9. The Enlightenment, or The Age of Reason
10. Deism in England
11. The French Philosophes: 'Ecrasez l'infame'
12. Deism in America
13. Romanticism and Transcendentalism
14. New Political and Social Sciences
16. Freethought in America Between the Revolution and the Civil War
17. Freethought in America After the Civil War
18. Radical British Atheism and the National Secular Society
19. Humanism in the Movement to End Slavery
20. The Women’s Rights Movement
21. Birth Control and Sexual Freedom
22. Charles Darwin and Evolution
24. Humanists and Peace Movements
25. Humanist Leaders of the African-American Civil Rights Movement
27. Unitarian Universalists in the 20th Century
28. Ethical Culture Society: Deed Before Creed
29. Early 20th Century Humanists
30. American Humanist Association and Humanist Manifesto
31. Other Humanist and Freethought Organizations
32. European Humanism in the 20th Century