John D. Baldwin

John Denison Baldwin (1809–1883) was a Congregationalist minister, antislavery newspaper editor, and Massachusetts congressman who wrote on ancient civilizations outside his working hours. He took a theology degree at Yale Divinity School in 1834, owned and edited the Worcester Spy from 1859 until his death, and served three terms in the U.S. House during and after the Civil War, arguing for equal rights for Black Americans in Human Rights and Human Races (1868). His archaeological books, chiefly Pre-Historic Nations (1869) and Ancient America (1871), reached a wide general readership and made him one of the better-known amateur students of the subject in nineteenth-century America.