Latest Articles
Books from Bob’s Library #10: The Thinker’s Library
Books From Bob’s Library is a semi-regular series in which freethought book collector and National Secular Society historian…
Review of ‘American Freethought’, a four-part film series by Roderick Bradford and the Council for Secular Humanism (USA)
It seems to me that freethinkers and secularists are bad at recording, sharing, and promoting their own history.…
Books from Bob’s Library #9: ‘My Godforsaken Life’ by Barbara Smoker
Books From Bob’s Library is a semi-regular series in which freethought book collector and National Secular Society historian…
Books from Bob’s Library #8: our friend ‘The Truth Seeker’
Books From Bob’s Library is a semi-regular series in which freethought book collector and National Secular Society historian…
Obituary: Michael Laccohee Bush, 1938-2025
Those of our readers with an interest in freethought and radical history will be saddened to learn of…
Books From Bob’s Library #7: The Trial of the Rev. Robert Wedderburn for Blasphemy
Books From Bob’s Library is a semi-regular series in which freethought book collector and National Secular Society historian…
Books from Bob’s Library #4: The Freethinker—over a century of issues now available as a digital archive
Books From Bob’s Library is a semi-regular series in which freethought book collector and National Secular Society historian…
Books From Bob’s Library #6: Charles Southwell and ‘The Oracle of Reason’
Books From Bob’s Library is a semi-regular series in which freethought book collector and National Secular Society historian…
The Freethinker Christmas Specials (Or, Happy Solstice!)
When George William Foote launched the Freethinker in May 1881, he did so in part out of fury…
What’s Happened to Free Speech? Musings of a Troubled Freethinker
This is almost certainly the first and last time the words of George Galloway will be repeated in…
Books from Bob’s Library #5: Henry Hetherington and ‘The Poor Man’s Guardian’
Books From Bob’s Library is a semi-regular series in which freethought book collector and National Secular Society historian…
Image of the week: ‘The Tree of Liberty – with the Devil tempting John Bull’ by James Gillray (1798)
James Gillray’s (1765-1815) hand-coloured etching was originally published by Hannah Humphrey (1745-1818) in 1798. It would have been…
Books from Bob’s Library #3: Richard Carlile’s ‘The Republican’ and ‘Every Woman’s Book’
Books From Bob’s Library is a semi-regular series in which freethought book collector and National Secular Society historian…
Books from Bob’s Library #2: Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’
Books From Bob’s Library is a semi-regular series in which freethought book collector and National Secular Society historian…
Books From Bob’s Library #1: Introduction and Thomas Paine’s ‘The Age of Reason’
A new series on historical freethought literature, from freethought book collector Bob Forder.
Review of ‘A Dirty, Filthy Book’ by Michael Meyer
The ‘cause célèbre’ that projected Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, and the National Secular Society onto the national stage.
‘There is nothing easy or empty about humanity and reason’: in memoriam Jim Herrick (1944–2023)
Historian Bob Forder on the life of Jim Herrick, Freethinker editor from 1977-1981.
Image of the week: The Freethought Road
A 19th-century cartoon by Watson Heston, originally published in The Truth Seeker.
Freethought and secularism
The views of Chapman Cohen, former president of the National Secular Society and editor of the Freethinker, on freethought and…
Image of the week: ‘The world is my country, to do good my religion!’
The Truth Seeker was a radical American magazine founded in 1873 by the ex-Shaker and freethinker, DeRobigne Mortimer…