1/1, August 1883-1907. 13 x 20. 4 pp., $1.25 a year.

The issues were dated with the standard month and day but gave the years as "E.M.," the "Era of Man," calculated from the execution of Giordano Bruno in 1600. The journal from the first issue labeled itself as "n.s.," but the reference was to earlier journals under different names. It was put out by Harman and his children and the layout, orthography and condition of the type reflect its origin as a labor of love rather than a commercial venture. A third series was started in 1897 in Chicago. Harman (1830-1910) was a former teacher and Methodist minister who turned his stubbornness and effort first to abolition and then to free thought, individual sovereignty (anarchy), and marriage reform ("free love," as its more socially acceptable version was then known). Lucifer was one of he cornerstones of American liberalism's long fight against Anthony Comstock and the obscenity laws. It began in 1880 as The Valley Falls (Kansas) Liberal, the organ of the local Liberal League, with Harman as one of the editors, and the next year was transformed into the Kansas Liberal which Harman edited with Annie L. Diggs, a noted populist. The name was changed to Lucifer in 1883. There followed 10 years of arrests, indictments, appeals, and jailings before Harman moved the journal to Chicago in 1896--where he was again imprisoned in 1905. On his release he changed the journal's name to The American Journal of Eugenics and turned his attention exclusively to eugenics as the path to social betterment--though for Harman the term eugenics also included elements of libertinism which increasingly alienated Harman from more doctrinaire feminists. On Harman, see Hal D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence, KS: Regents' Press, 1977). For a period in the 1890s the journal had as a sister-publication in Wichita Lois Waisbrooker's Foundation Principles, and Waisbrooker helped publish Lucifer during one of Harman's stints in jail, only to be arrested herself for her work on the journal. Lillian Harman, Moses's daughter, split off from Lucifer in 1888 and started Fair Play with her husband. Harman regarded himself as a "tough materialist" but the journal carried regular correspondence on the troubled relationship between spiritualism and free thought mentioned some spiritualists (Moses Hull, Lois Waisbrooker, et al.) who were found acceptable.