Richard Hildreth, was an American journalist, author and historian. He is best known for writing his six-volume History of the United States of America covering 1497–1821 and published 1840-1853. Historians consider it a highly accurate political history of the early Republic, but with a strong bias in favor of the Federalist Party and the abolition of slavery.

Theodore Parker was an American transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. A reformer and abolitionist, his words and popular quotations would later inspire speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.