author
Frederic May Holland
1836–1908
A nineteenth-century Unitarian minister turned writer, he explored the long struggle for freedom in politics, religion, and thought. His books range from intellectual history to a well-known study of Frederick Douglass, showing a steady interest in liberty and reform.
1 Audiobook
Liberty in the Nineteenth Century
by Frederic May Holland
About the author
Born in Boston on May 2, 1836, Frederic May Holland studied at Harvard and was later ordained as a Unitarian minister in Rockford, Illinois. He eventually left the ministry and devoted more of his life to writing, bringing together religious training, historical curiosity, and a reform-minded outlook.
Holland wrote across several fields, but a common thread in his work was freedom: freedom of thought, political liberty, and social progress. His books include The Rise of Intellectual Liberty from Thales to Copernicus, Liberty in the Nineteenth Century, Sketches of the Progress of Freedom, and The Revolutions of 1688 and 1776. He also wrote Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator, a biography that helped introduce readers of his time to Douglass's life and importance.
He died on May 17, 1908, in Concord, Massachusetts. Today, he is remembered as a serious, wide-ranging writer whose work reflects the big moral and political debates of the nineteenth century.