The Freethought Trail website traces west-central New York state’s pivotal role in the history of freethought. It is a project of the Council for Secular Humanism.

A Beliefnet excerpt from Susan Jacoby’s book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism focuses on the so-called Golden Age of Freethought, a period during the late 19th and early 20th centuries when freethinkers’ ideas became more broadly disseminated in the U.S., thanks particularly to popular orators such as Robert Ingersoll.

Jonathan Miller explored the history of disbelief in a BBC series in 2005.

A chapter on the Atheist movement’s history is included in Gordon Stein’s 1980 book An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism.

James N. Gregory is a history professor at the University of Washington and director of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. Among books he has written is The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Paul Harvey is a professor of American history at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. He wrote Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South From the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era and co-edited (with Philip Goff) The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945. Harvey is working on a history of […]

David W. Wills is Winthrop H. Smith ’16 Professor of American History and American Studies in the religion and black studies departments at Amherst College in Amherst, Mass. He is general editor of “African-American Religion: A Documentary History Project.” Wills is a historian of religion in the U.S. with particular emphasis on African-American religious history.

Robert Saler is director of the Lilly Endowment’s National Clergy Renewal Program, which provides grants to congregations offering their pastors breaks for rest and renewal. More than 700 congregations and their pastors have benefited.

Claudine Michel chairs the department of black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She edits The Journal of Haitian Studies and co-edited (with Patrick Bellegarde-Smith) two books on Vodou, Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, And Reality (Indiana University Press, 2006) and Invisible Powers: Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).