Free love : the story of a great American scandal / Robert Shaplen ; with a foreword by Louis Menand.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shaplen, Robert, 1917-1988, author.

Contributor:

Menand, Louis, writer of foreword.

Standardized Title:

Free love and heavenly sinners

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Trials (Adultery)--United States--History--19th century.

Trials (Adultery).

Congregationalists--New York (State)--New York--Biography.

Congregationalists.

Trials (Adultery)--United States--19th century.

Beecher, Henry Ward, 1813-1887--Trials, litigation, etc.

Beecher, Henry Ward.

Tilton, Theodore, 1835-1907--Trials, litigation, etc.

Tilton, Theodore.

Tilton, Elizabeth M. Richards, 1834-1897--Trials, litigation, etc.

Tilton, Elizabeth M. Richards.

Woodhull, Victoria C. (Victoria Claflin), 1838-1927.

Woodhull, Victoria C.

Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)--Biography.

Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.).

United States--Social life and customs--1865-1918.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xvi, 238 pages : black and white illustrations ; 22 cm

Edition:

First McNally Editions paperback.

Place of Publication:

New York : McNally Editions, [2024]

Summary:

"On the night of July 3, 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confessed to her husband that she'd had an affair with their pastor, Henry Ward Beecher. This secret would soon transfix America, for Beecher was the most famous preacher of the day, founder of the most fashionable church in Brooklyn Heights, a presidential hopeful, an influential supporter of abolition, and a leader of the campaign for women's suffrage. When Beecher tried to silence the Tiltons, it was a whisper network of suffragists, notably Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spread news of the affair, and it was the radical Victoria Woodhull-an outspoken proponent of 'free love'-who seized on it, as political dynamite, to blow up the myth of monogamy among the political elite. Her public accusations led to even more public trials, which shocked the country and divided the most progressive thinkers of the era. In 1953, the journalist Robert Shaplen revisited the Tilton-Beecher affair in a series of articles for the New Yorker, relying on 3,000 pages of contemporary accounts-court transcripts, love-letters, newspaper reports and illustrations, even political cartoons-to reanimate a scandal that shook the American reform movement and to expose a strand of America's cultural DNA that remains recognizable today--Page 2 of cover.

Contents:

Nesting on the heights

The overturned nest

The broken eggs.

Notes:

"McNally Editions no. 28"--Cover.

Initially published as a series of articles for the New Yorker.

Includes bibliographical references.

"Originally published in 1954 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, New York"--Verso title page.

ISBN:

9781946022912

1946022918

OCLC:

1384411990

Publisher Number:

90100994432