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Dictionary of UU Biography

What started as a small, UUHS board-directed project less than two years ago has now become one of our most successful projects of record, attracting dozens of volunteer researchers, authors, and editors. Under the mangament of UUHS board member Rev. Peter Hughes, this important online resource now boasts 100 published entries with many more on the way.

Visitors to the Dictionary of UU Biography  can learn about Celia Burleigh, The Peabody Sisters, Rod Serling, Nathan Appleton, Margaret Fuller, Noah Worcester, Robert Burns, Olympia Brown, Edward Turner, Lydia Maria Child, Adlai Stevenson, and Ezra Ripley, just to name a handful. Entries currently in the works include those on John Quincy Adams, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Murray, Judith Sargent Murray, Theodore Parker, Louisa May Alcott, Frank Lloyd Wright, Fannie Farmer, James Martineau, Hannah Adams, Carl Seaburg, May Sarton, and Jose Maria Blanco-White.

At a talk at General Assembly 2001, Peter Hughes explained that the DUUB project "was first proposed during the summer of 1999 in a series of conversations held on UUHS-CHAT, an internet discussion list sponsored by the UUHS."  He went on to say, "We thought there was a need for a reference that would do the following things:

• give short biographies of famous people who are known or thought to be Unitarians and/or Universalists which would tell us, with some authority and show of evidence, of their Unitarian and/or Universalist affiliation;
• describe the religious faiths of well known Unitarian and Universalist persons and show how these faiths were connected to their lives and
  accomplishments;
• include biographies of Unitarian and/or Universalist laypeople and clergy who are known primarily for their contributions to our religious tradition;
• go beyond the relatively small number of people usually discussed in our histories and include a number of those whose important contributions have been heretofore neglected;
• include biographies of people both American and non-American;
• include important figures in regional denominational history;
• make a special attempt to include people systematically excluded from references of earlier generations, such as women and minorities, whose real contributions have been slighted or overlooked; and
• make use of the contributions of many writers, each researching biographies of great interest to themselves and/or lying within their fields of established expertise."

Peter remembered, "When a number of people began to show enthusiasm for the idea, I did some research to see if such a project was already complete or underway. I did find a few related projects, and a few published works, but none of them had the special focus, the detail, or the scope of our proposal. We then gathered a committee to discuss how we might define the project in more practical terms." This committee eventually agreed on the following policies, before anyone put pen to paper (or mouse to pad):

• they would only include dead people (making the dictionary consistent with American National Biography and other similar reference works);
• the starting date would be the year 1500;
• people who properly belong entirely to another religious tradition would not to be considered, no matter how heretical their personal theology might have been;
• the entries would be made especially for the dictionary, according to the committee's standards, and would use original research. They would ask writers to consult primary sources whenever possible, particularly when the question of Unitarian or Universalist identity was at issue.
• When dealing with UU heroes, they resolved not to offer hagiography, but to include weakness and failure along with strength and accomplishment.

With these policies in place, the committee recruited a diverse group of writers. Peter Hughes described the DUUB's contributors as "a heterogeneous group—professionals and amateurs, traditional scholars and revisionists, denominational historians and historians of politics and culture, students of American history and students of the histories of other nations, Unitarians and Universalists and Unitarian Universalists, local historians and family historians, people interested in women's history and those interested in uncovering the contributions of other heretofore neglected groups."

He went on to say, "Some are young, a larger portion are older. There are students, ministers, and lay people. Some are North Americans, others live overseas. There are some for whom English is not their first language. Some researchers do the work in their spare time away from the day job, others use it as a post-retirement project. Some of our contributors are professional historians, others are interested amateurs who are no less devoted, however, to the study of history. Some of our writers are published biographers; for others of our volunteers this may be their first venture at disciplined historical writing."

To date, DUUB authors include: John Buescher, Frank Carpenter, Ernest Cassara, Mary Ellen Cleary, Elizabeth Curtiss, Dennis Davidson, Jaume de Marcos, Charles Eddis, Max Gaebler, Joan Goodwin, Knut Heidelberg, Richard Henry, Walter Herz, Phillip Hewett, Olive Hoogenboom, Charles Howe, Wesley Hromatko, Lynn G. Hughes, Peter Hughes, Richard Kellaway, John Keohane, Dennis Landis, Laurie Carter Noble, Stephen Papa, David Pettee, Susan Ritchie, Paula Robbins, David Robinson, Alan Ruston, Frank Schulman, Bonnie Hurd Smith, and Beringia Zen.

The DUUB committee also gathered together a strong team of editors to work with the variety of text they knew they would receive and to maintain DUUB standards and accuracy. "Often," Peter explained, "when we receive a draft article, it is the beginning of a lengthy collaborative process (mostly via email) wherein an article is structured, new material discovered, historical details verified, and prose tightened. The assigned editor frequently has at least a general expertise on the subject in question. When we have felt the need for more expertise we have sent the draft to expert readers. Nevertheless, the author has the last word on the text; no article is put in the dictionary unless the author approves it."

It’s tough work, but the DUUB has had a stellar group of editors including Peter Hughes (senior editor), Joan Goodwin, Alice Blair Wesley, Andrew Hill, Spencer Lavan, Jim Nugent, and Jerome Bowers.

"When the text is finalized," Peter continued, "I read it looking for places to insert links to existing articles, for our Dictionary is a web in itself, with each article eventually to be linked to many others. Finally, after the HTML version is prepared, illustrations are chosen and inserted and the new article is placed in the dictionary."

An important consideration, however, is that the appearance of the entry in the DUUB does not mean the end of the process. Peter stressed, "some of our articles have been modified months after completion."

"I look upon the Dictionary project as having at least two results," Peter told his audience. "One is, of course, a useful reference work, which will contain a few original contributions to scholarship and will help to extend the scope of Unitarian Universalist history. The other, perhaps not less important, comes from the mega-collaborative nature of the process of creating this work. In the making of the Dictionary we hope to encourage many of our contributors to develop themselves as historians. We hope that more people will take the plunge into historical research and writing, and that some who heretofore have been too shy to step forward with their topics of quiet expertise, will now begin to do so."

Eventually, the UUHS hopes to publish the DUUB in book form--perhaps in several volumes. But, as Peter explained, "we will not necessarily wait until the project is finished because, by its very nature, it can never be finished."

The DUUB is an activity of the UUHS and it is supported by its members. The project has also received funding from the Fund for Unitarian Universalism. For more information, please contact Peter Hughes, chief editor, at peterhughes @mindspring.com .

Please send comments or corrections to psprecher@uuma.org . This site was updated June 10, 2008.