The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, Volume I

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This is the colorful self-portrait of a central figure in American Protestantism; Lyman Beecher played a major role between 1790 and 1850 in creating an expansive evangelical faith. The Autobiography is a rich mosaic of records, reminiscences, and correspondence gathered by Beecher’s many children (among them, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher). It has significant cultural interest as the history of a modified Calvinism, and of a dynamic conception of a disestablished national church; and it offers a striking picture of the turbulent inner life of a nineteenth-century New England family.