The Beechers

America's Most Influential Family

by Obbie Tyler Todd

Foreword by Mark A. Noll

368 Pages / 6.00 x 9.00 x 1.19 in / 15 halftones

Hardcover

9780807182758

Published: November 2024

$39.95

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eBook

9780807183380

Published: November 2024

(Requires the Leaf e-Reader app)

$19.95

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Praise
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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.

Obbie Tyler Todd is pastor of Third Baptist Church in Marion, Illinois, and adjunct professor of church history at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Let Men Be Free: Baptist Politics in the Early United States, 1776–1835.

“In a lively and clear narrative, Todd keeps the lives, loves, and projects of moral improvement undertaken by the eleven children of Lyman Beecher interwoven in a chronological history of the Beecher family. A more rounded and intimate picture of Lyman Beecher than we have had, and a great window into the social and religious ferment of the nineteenth century.” ~Joan D. Hedrick, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life

“The Beecher family had it all, and it’s all in Obbie Tyler Todd’s wide-ranging book. Piety. Erudition. Eloquence. Activism. Scandal. The Beechers is a thoughtful and entertaining history. Highly recommended.” ~John G. Turner, author of They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty

“The Beecher family was amazing. Their story offers a window through which to view some of the most influential and often contested outlooks in the era spanning the American Civil War.” ~George M. Marsden, author of Jonathan Edwards: A Life

“This is the best book on Lyman Beecher’s legacies, the nineteenth-century Beecher family, and ‘Beecherism’ on offer.” ~Douglas A. Sweeney, author of Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment

Book Cover Image

Obbie Tyler Todd Author Photo