Public Research Talk: A Transcendentalist Peace: American Pacifism from Lydia Maria Child to Jane Addams
Common Room, CSWR
42 Francis Ave., Cambridge, MA
Mon., Sep. 28, 2026, 12 – 1:30 p.m. 
Registration is required.
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In 1839, abolitionist Lydia Maria Child called the first Peace Convention in Boston “unquestionably the greatest event of the nineteenth century.” “Posterity will marvel,” she wrote, “at the early adoption of such transcendental principles.” Seventy-five years later, Jane Addams honed transcendentalist ideas into a theory of pacifism that Child would have recognized—one built on moral self-reliance, faith in individual transformation, and a dedication to justice through applied democracy. These women's ideas, and the example of their lives, are deeply relevant today as we struggle, in a war-torn world, to imagine a lasting peace.
Lydia Moland is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. She is the author of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life (2022), a biography of abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and American Scholar, among other publications. She is also the author of books on classical German philosophy and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century (2025). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2025, she was a Fulbright Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently working on a group biography of interwar pacifists, provisionally titled Pacifist Women at War: Four Paths to Peace.
Programming Series: Transcendentalism
Gazette Classification: Humanities, Lecture, Religion
Sponsor: Center for the Study of World Religions
Contact: Laurie D. Sedgwick, CSWR Events Coordinator, [email protected]
More info: cswr.hds.harvard.edu…