Charles Henry Appleton Dall (February 12, 1816-July 18, 1886), a Unitarian minister to the poor in the United States and an early Unitarian minister in Canada, was for three decades the only Unitarian missionary to India. He influenced and worked with the leaders of the liberal Hindu Brahmo Samaj movement and, controversially, joined the Brahmos himself.
Frederick May Eliot (September 15, 1889-February 17, 1958), longtime minister of Unity Church, St. Paul, Minnesota and Chair of the Unitarian Commission on Appraisal, served as President of the American Unitarian Association (AUA) for twenty years, guiding the denomination through a period of growth and helping it to better communicate its liberal religious faith.
William Arthur Peacock (August 23, 1905-September 15, 1968) was a British Universalist and Unitarian minister, Labour Party politician, and a journalist in religion and politics. He was minister of the South London Universalist Church and the Wandsworth Unitarian Church, and the first Press Relations officer of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.
James Freeman (April 22, 1759-November 14, 1835), Minister of King’s Chapel in Boston for 43 years, was the first preacher in America to call himself a Unitarian. Unlike New England liberal Congregationalist ministers, who approached Unitarianism through Arianism, he was Socinian in theology and developed links with Unitarians in England.
Albert Charles Dieffenbach (July 4, 1876-October 6, 1963), a Unitarian minister and religious journalist, was the editor of The Christian Register, religion editor of The Boston Evening Transcript, and the first minister of the Church of the Larger Fellowship.
Brook Farm, a celebrated nineteenth-century New England utopian community, was founded by Unitarian minister George Ripley and other progressive, Transcendentalist Unitarians, to be, in Ripley’s words, a new Jerusalem, the “city of God, anew.” From its founding in 1841 until it went bankrupt in 1847, Brook Farm influenced many of the social reform movements of its day: abolitionism, associationalism, the workingmen’s movement, and the women’s rights movement.
Sir (Joseph) Austen Chamberlain (October 16, 1863-March 16, 1937), British politician and statesman, was the son of Joseph Chamberlain and the older brother of Neville Chamberlain. As architect of the Locarno Treaties, meant to preserve peace in post-World War I Western Europe, he was awarded the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize.
Albert Rhys Williams (Sept 28, 1883-Feb 27, 1962), a labor organizer and journalist, was a witness to and a participant in the Russian Revolution of October 1917. He was a friend of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and American Communist writer John Reed.
Caroline Evans Veatch (April 17, 1870-October 4, 1953) was a modest widow who, because she was homebound, was never able to attend the Unitarian society she joined late in life. Her bequest transformed the congregation that inspired her and has sustained both the Unitarian Universalist Association and many other UU organizations.
Eliza Tupper Wilkes (October 8, 1844-February 5, 1917) was a circuit-riding preacher who started eleven Universalist and Unitarian churches in the American West. Among the first women ordained into the ministry, Wilkes worked with and mentored other liberal women ministers in the West.
John Hassler Dietrich (1878-1957), minister for almost a quarter of a century at the First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was among the first Unitarian ministers to boldly preach that humanist thinking was the true foundation of religious liberalism.
Curtis Williford Reese (September 3, 1887-June 5, 1961) was an educator, administrator, social activist, journalist, and Unitarian minister. He was a founder and president of the American Humanist Association, Secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference (WUC), and Dean of the Abraham Lincoln Centre, an integrated social and educational community organization in Chicago.