Harry Elmer Barnes

From Philosopedia

Barnes, Harry Elmer (15 June 1889 - 25 August 1968)

An eminent historian and naturalistic humanist, Barnes in the 1950s was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.

At Columbia University, he was considered to have been a pioneer of historical revisionism, one who challenged past historians' work, most often by opposing the Whig history or the "court history" that others had used.

An admirer of liberals, regarded as a leader of the progressive intelligentsia, he found in 1955 they are “a fast disappearing race. Only a few – such as John Haynes Holmes, Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas, and the like – still survive, and they are getting old.”

Barnes wrote over a dozen books, including The Twilight of Christianity (1929) and Freeing the Human Mind (1931). His connection with the formulating of Humanist Manifesto I has been described by Edwin H. Wilson in The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995).

Correspondence

Barnes was an activist Humanist, as shown by his correspondence:

{CE; CL; EW; FUS; HM1; HNS; TRI}