The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century

xvii, 653 pp. "This major biography of a fascinating, complex, and enormously influential family covers an entire era of American history- the nineteenth century. Almost every member of the Beecher family, from the patriarch, Lyman, through his eleven surviving sons and daughters, became intimately involved in most of the major issues of their day: the liberalizing of early Puritanism, antislavery ferment, the Civil War, and Women's Rights.