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William H. Cook, of the village of Ticonderoga, exemplified the strong, high-minded farmer of the nineteenth century. Devoted to his only son, Joseph, William's one consuming desire was to see that this boy should have an education with the best. Although it meant years of financial sacrifices for the old farmer, Joseph was sent to the finest schools: Phillips Andover, Yale, Harvard, and universities in Germany. After twenty years of education, Joseph became famous as the "Boston Monday Lecturer," whose talks on subjects ranging from theology and science to current events and world history attracted thousands of listeners every week and were reprinted in newspapers around the world. His lect...
Finalist for the 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Biography Category One hundred fifty years ago, the Adirondack Mountains were overrun. Thousands of middle-class urbanites from Boston and New York City abandoned the comfort of their homes and rushed into the unknown, northern wilderness, believing they would find great restorative and even curative powers. These would-be adventurers were informed by one man, William Henry Harrison Murray, a preacher from Boston. A Passionate Life is the first comprehensive biography of Murray, a man who has been described as the father of the American outdoor movement and the modern vacation. While he is best known for his promotion of the...
In a major revision of accepted wisdom, this book, originally published by UNC Press in 1991, demonstrates that American social Christianity played an important role in racial reform during the period between Emancipation and the civil rights movement. As organizations created by the heirs of antislavery sentiment foundered in the mid-1890s, Ralph Luker argues, a new generation of black and white reformers--many of them representatives of American social Christianity--explored a variety of solutions to the problem of racial conflict. Some of them helped to organize the Federal Council of Churches in 1909, while others returned to abolitionist and home missionary strategies in organizing the NAACP in 1910 and the National Urban League in 1911. A half century later, such organizations formed the institutional core of America's civil rights movement. Luker also shows that the black prophets of social Christianity who espoused theological personalism created an influential tradition that eventually produced Martin Luther King Jr.
William H. H. Murray wrote his celebrated book in the spring of 1869 to introduce city-dwellers to the rewards of camping in the wilderness. Thousands of tourists streamed to the Adirondacks that summer in what was known as "Murray's Rush." Unfortunately, most had not read the book carefully, and that summer was unusually wet and cold. The result was an enormous outcry against Murray and his "lies," to which he responded with vigor in an article published in the New-York Daily Tribune, October 23, 1869, and included here.
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