Theodore Parker (Lexington, Massachusetts, August 24, 1810 – Florence, Italy, May 10, 1860) was an American Transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. A reformer and abolitionist, his words and quotations which he popularized would later inspire speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Theodore Parker was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, the youngest child in a large farming family. His grandfather was John ...
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Theodore Parker (Lexington, Massachusetts, August 24, 1810 – Florence, Italy, May 10, 1860) was an American Transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. A reformer and abolitionist, his words and quotations which he popularized would later inspire speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Theodore Parker was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, the youngest child in a large farming family. His grandfather was John Parker, the leader of the Lexington militia at the Battle of Lexington. Among his colonial Yankee ancestors was Thomas Hastings, who came from the East Anglia region of England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, and Deacon Thomas Parker, who came from England in 1635 and was one of the founders of Reading. Most of his family had died by the time Parker was 27, probably due to tuberculosis.
He was educated privately and through personal study until he attended Harvard College, where he graduated in 1831. He entered the Harvard Divinity...
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