Ernest Freeberg

Ernest Freeberg grew up in New England, attended Middlebury College, and worked as a reporter for Maine Public Radio. Now a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee, he has published four books. The Education of Laura Bridgman explores the intellectual and religious debates that surrounded the first successful attempt to educate a deaf-blind person. The book won the Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association, a biennial prize for the best first book in any field of American history. His second book, Democracy's Prisoner, explores one of the most important free speech fights in American history, provoked by the imprisonment of socialist leader Eugene V. Debs for his anti-war speech in 1918. The book was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in biography, and won both the David Langum Award for Legal History and the Eli Oboler Award from the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Roundtable. Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, examines the social and cultural impact of electric light on American society in that invention's early decades. The American Library Association named The Age of Edison a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2014. His most recent book, A Traitor to his Species, examines the crusade against animal cruelty launched by Henry Bergh and many others in the late 19th century. Founding the SPCA movement in the US, Bergh was both admired and ridiculed for being the nation's most vocal ally of all animals, waging a tireless war on cruelty that marked a sea change in the human relationship to our fellow species.