page_title: The Truth Seeker
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: The Truth Seeker / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The Truth Seeker office at 21 Clinton Place, Manhattan, New York
context_page_description: The Truth Seeker is an American periodical published beginning in 1873. It was considered the most influential Freethought publication during the period following the Civil War into the first decades of the 20th Century, known as the Golden Age of Freethought. Though there were other influential Freethought periodicals, Truth Seeker was the only one with a national circulation. The headquarters is in San Diego, California. The Truth Seeker is the world’s oldest freethought publication, and one of the oldest periodicals in America. Among general-readership titles, only Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and The Nation are older.
context_section_description: Throughout its 145-year history, The Truth Seeker continuously championed freedom of inquiry, women’s rights, and Darwinian evolution, and promoted figures like Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll. From 1873 to about 1920, The Truth Seeker was the dominant journal of a reform movement.  
  From 1920 until 1950 it was a journal with a proud past undergoing a slow decline. 1950 to 1988 marked its most troubled period, when the periodical embraced racism, eugenics, and anti-Semitism, but because of that achieved the smallest impact in its history. (At its peak in the late nineteenth century, The Truth Seeker’s circulation had been 50,000, yet this number dropped to fewer than 400 during the dark years.)
  After 1988, the bigoted content never recurred. Production values increased. From 1989 to 1998 The Truth Seeker was a wholly respectable publication, if one whose editorial focus was sometimes uncritically inclusive. This policy continued until 2013, albeit with an irregular publishing schedule. Since 2014 The Truth Seeker has been under a new editor, Roderick Bradford, and under the ownership of the Council for Secular Humanism. The Truth Seeker’s new editorial commitment looks back to the title’s greatest years of impact and significance.
caption: The Truth Seeker office at 21 Clinton Place, Manhattan, New York. Founder D.M. Bennett died here on Dec. 6, 1882.
exif: {"Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image Software": "Photos 3.0", "Image DateTime": "2019:01:10 08:49:18", "Image Artist": "Picasa", "Image ExifOffset": "142", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2019:01:10 08:49:18", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2019:01:10 08:49:18", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "989", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "687", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "04f11c605c650efb392cb4382837ebcc"}