A few weeks ago, when the Kindle edition of this book first came out, I wrote: "I guess I'll have to get a Kindle, or else borrow my daughter's, to keep reading this book--but the introductory portion featured on the book's Amazon page certainly leaves a reader hungry for more. How about a print version, though? It'd seem to me to be a worthwhile project."
The book's traditional print version is now available, and I reiterate my thanks to Thomas Lawson for resurrecting, as it were, an obscure but important facet of Kentucky history as well as that of American freethought. The only difference I see between these colorful and variegated testimonies of nonbelief, and similar missives available in blog postings on the Internet today, is that the 1903 letter writers were, by and large, quite a bit more articulate and mannerly than their Internet journalistic heirs. Even so, some of the writers do have an annoying tendency--as do their contemporaries--to employ "shock language" to stir up, as it were, the fretful complacency of their fundamentalist Christian counterparts. But the issues are still the same--and are still waiting to be addressed by the American public at large.
