Description

The Reverend Lyman Beecher was once called the father of more brains than any other man in America. Among his eleven living children were a celebrity novelist, a college president, the most well-known preacher in America, a suffragist, a radical abolitionist, a pioneer in women s education, and the founder of home economics. Rejecting many of their father s Puritan beliefs, the deeply religious Beechers nevertheless embraced his quest to exert moral influence. They disagreed over issues of slavery, women s rights, and religion and found themselves at the center of race riots, denominational splits, college protests, a civil war, and one of the most public sex scandals in American history. They were nonetheless unified in their Beecherism –a phrase used to describe their sense of self-importance in reforming the nation. Obbie Tyler Todd s masterful work is the first biography of the Beechers in more than forty years and the first chronological portrait of one of the most influential families in nineteenth-century America.