Biographies

I've long been interested in the history of science, but it is only since I became involved with Leicester Secular Society and its history, in 2000, that I began to look more deeply into the often neglected history of radical reformers and free thinkers. In 2005 I started to write some articles for Wikipedia and in 2010 I also became involved with the Humanist Heritage project. The following biographies collect some of the results of this research. I can't claim much originality in these biographies, there are some points and links I have uncovered through library and archive research, but most of the information has been gathered from other sources online, to which links are provided where much further detail can often be found. Some other names unrelated to the main theme are included for no reason than that they have interested me at some time.

List of biographies and related topics:

General Topics 1663 The Lucasian Chair 1792 Constitutional Reform 1839 Halls of Science Ancient and Mediaeval −469 Socrates −341 Epicurus −99 Lucretius −4 Jesus of Nazareth 370 Hypatia 730 Alcuin of York 1080 Adelard of Bath

Enlightenment 1642 Isaac Newton 1693 Peter Annet 1694 Voltaire 1706 John Baskerville 1706 Benjamin Franklin 1711 David Hume 1737 Thomas Paine 1745 Chevalier de la Barre 1748 Jeremy Bentham Owenite Period 1771 Robert Owen 1776 George Birkbeck 1778 Henry Brougham 1790 Richard Carlile 1802 Harriet Martineau 1804 Richard Owen 1806 John Stuart Mill

Secularist Period 1809 Charles Darwin 1817 G. J. Holyoake 1818 Josiah Gimson 1818 Michael Wright 1820 Herbert Spencer 1831 Harriet Law 1832 Moncure Conway 1833 Charles Bradlaugh 1834 James Thomson 1835 Charles Watts 1845 W. K. Clifford 1847 Annie Besant c.1852 F. T. Mott

Ethicists and Humanists 1855 F. J. Gould 1856 J. M. Robertson 1857 Stanton Coit 1858 Charles Albert Watts 1864 Gustav Spiller 1866 John Gott 1867 Joseph McCabe 1887 Max Sievers 1888 Fenner Brockway 1897 F. J. Ridley Modern 1902 Paul Dirac 1906 Phyllis Pearsall 1912 Alan Turing 1912 Wernher von Braun 1943 Peter Miller