Amos Bronson Alcott - Margaret Fuller - Theodore Parker

Amos Bronson Alcott ( 1799 – 1888) was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As an educator, Alcott pioneered new ways of interacting with young students, focusing on a conversational style, and avoided traditional punishment. He hoped to perfect the human spirit and, to that end, advocated a vegan diet before the term was coined. He was also an abolitionist and an advocate for women's rights. Of his four daughters, the second Louisa May, fictionalized her experience with the family in her novel Little Women in 1868.

 Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, commonly known as Margaret Fuller, (1810 – 1850) was an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. Fuller agreed with the transcendental concern for the psychological well-being of the individual, though she was never comfortable being labeled a transcendentalist. Like other members of the Transcendental Club, she rebelled against the past and believed in the possibility of change.

Theodore Parker (_{Lexington, Massachusetts}, 1810 – _{Florence, Italy}, 1860) was an American Transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. A reformer and abolitionist, his words and quotations which he popularized would later inspire speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

"A democracy,— of all the people, by all the people, for all the people;" stated Parker in 1850 which later influenced Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Parker might have developed his phrase from John Wycliffe's_[1] prologue to the first English translation of the Bible: “This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.”

 [1]John Wycliffe (also Wyclif, Wycliff, or Wickliffe) (c. 1320 –1384) was an English theologian and early proponent of reform in the Roman Catholic Church during the 14th century. He made an English translation of the Bible in one complete edition and is considered a precursor of the Protestant Reformation (thus becoming known as "The Morning Star of the Reformation").