Free-Thought on the American Frontier

Edited by Fred Whitehead and Verle Muhrer.

The great majority of historians of American philosophy and intellectual life have concentrated on the East as representative of the whole nation. Yet the West produced its own culture and outstanding personalities, who embodied the qualities of hardy individualism and devotion to freedom of thought and expression.

This anthology of freethought writing from the American Midwest and West provides a bracing view of a rich and vital democratic culture that has existed on the "American frontier" over the past 150 years. Noteworthy for their remarkable strength and humor, the literature and art of this culture are here documented in poetry, song, stories, memoirs, and essays, demonstrating the breadth and scope of American secularism from the early nineteenth centry to the present.

A special featue of this collection is the inclusion of grassroots contributions, such as feminist editorials from Kansas, letters from Colorado to the freethinker newspaper, The Truth Seeker, and selections from the Little Blue Books of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Many of these materials, hitherto available only in specialized research libraries, are here collected for the first time.

Hardcover. 314 pp.