This Magazine

The latter half of the Nineteenth Century, was known as “The Golden Age of Freethought,” being an approach of looking at the world through rational eyes, and using facts instead of superstition. In the small town of Salamanca, New York in December of 1882, Horace L. Green (1828-1903), printed the first edition of “The Freethinker’s Magazine.”

Over the next 21 years this obscure journal—which later moved to Chicago and was renamed “Free Thought Magazine“—provided a forum to the concepts and ideas that made up this vast universe encompassing free thought and Freethinkers. Google Books digitized volumes 11 through 21, comprising the last eleven years of this unique journal’s existence.

This site was designed to highlight a variety of different articles that have appeared in its pages during that unique period in our Country’s history, including editorial comments and recollections from Horace L. Green, the founder, editor and publisher of the Free Though Magazine.

For those wishing information regarding the upcoming History of Oregon Freethought lecture on January 25 in Portland, click the link!


Horace L. GreenThis is the most advanced Magazine published in this country or any other. It voices the best thought of this progressive age. As we have stated in our banner, it will be hospitable to all truth and especially devoted to the exposing of ancient error by the light of modern science and intelligent criticism, and in all things will be liberal. Every person of character and ability, whatever may be his or her views, who has something to say and knows how to say it, can get a hearing in this Magazine. Its name indicates the character of the Magazine.

It is a FREE Thinker’s Magazine—in no sectarian party sense, but in the broadest signification of the word Freethinker. No writer can be so conservative or so radical as to be excluded from its pages who presents his views in a decent and respectable manner. The aim of the editor is not so much to make its pages the arena for controversy as it is to establish a medium through which the most thorough investigators can express their best and most mature thoughts, and the friends of moral reforms can be heard in behalf of suffering humanity—or in other words:

This Magazine will be the special organ of the Freethought Church of America, which church is composed of all good people who are laboring in their respective spheres of life to make this old world a little better.

H.L. Green, Editor & Publisher; Chicago, 1893

Free Thought Magazine Title Page