As outspoken in his day as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens are today, American freethinker and author ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL (1833-1899) was a notorious radical whose uncompromising views on religion and slavery (they were bad, in his opinion), women's suffrage (a good idea, he believed), and other contentious matters of his era made him a wildly popular orator and critic of 19th-century American culture and public life.Considered in their day some of the finest gems of oratory, these lectures by Ingersoll feature some of his most entertaining and most insightful yet lesser known talks, including: "Eulogy on Abraham Lincoln" "Grand Future of America" "Best Portion of the Earth" "Getting Up Early in the Morning" "The Fashions and Handsome Women" "What the Railroads Have Done" "How a Man Should Treat His Wife and Children" "Ingersoll's Beautiful Dream" "War to Be a Failure" "Sufferings of the Slaves" "The Question of Superiority" "What Is a Capitalist?" "The Government a Pauper" "Beware of Bachelors" and many more.

Robert Ingersoll was America''s finest orator and foremost leader of freethinkers. Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Eugene V. Debs, and Elizabeth Cady used to gather to hear the speeches of "the great agnostic."Roger E. Greeley has selected the best from speeches and essays of this iconoclastic orator who labored to destroy the superstition and hypocrisy of fundamentalism in America and who answered the Moral Majority in the last century.One hundred years after he advanced into the national spotlight, Ingersoll''s commentaries still retain their fresh, penetrating, and witty character. His pleas for civil rights, the rights of women and children, responsible and responsive government, and individual freedom of conscience and religious belief have placed him in the vanguard of enlightened thinkers.Today the legacy of Robert Ingersoll, prophet and pioneer, merits the attention of anyone who espouses humane, liberal, rational, or agnostic opinions.