Throughout the book he relates the Enlightenment to Protestant Christianity, for it is out of the clashes and reconciliations between those two systems that 19th-century American culture--a culture that lasted almost to our own time--took shape. Defined so broadly, the religion of Enlightenment obviously included many different kinds of people--deists and skeptics and liberal Christians, aristocrats and democrats, conservatives and revolutionaries. May divides the European Enlightenment into four major categories, and shows how each had a different effect in America. Obviously some ideas could be transmitted more easily than others to a society overwhelmingly Protestant and rapidly becoming democratic. May shows how the Enlightenment affected the thoughts and actions of major figures like Jefferson, Franklin, and John Adams, but these familiar figures are treated against a background of less well-known people--doctors and ministers, scientists and planters and politicians.

There are three significant questions which may be asked about the Enlightenment, as about any similar phenomenon: what? whence? and whither? This is a short general survey of this important movement in the history of ideas, which would combine some account of the historical and social background with a closer look at the thought of the more outstanding individuals.

A provocative reassessment of the concept of an American golden age of European-born reason and intellectual curiosity in the years following the Revolutionary War The accepted myth of the “American Enlightenment” suggests that the rejection of monarchy and establishment of a new republic in the United States in the eighteenth century was the realization of utopian philosophies born in the intellectual salons of Europe and radiating outward to the New World. In this revelatory work, Stanford historian Caroline Winterer argues that a national mythology of a unitary, patriotic era of enlightenment in America was created during the Cold War to act as a shield against the threat of totalitarianism, and that Americans followed many paths toward political, religious, scientific, and artistic enlightenment in the 1700s that were influenced by European models in more complex ways than commonly thought. Winterer’s book strips away our modern inventions of the American national past, exploring which of our ideas and ideals are truly rooted in the eighteenth century and which are inventions and mystifications of more recent times.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This book shows in detail the Enlightenment origin of the US Constitution. It provides vivid analysis of how the Enlightenment's basic ideas were reformulated in the context of America.

The first reference work on one of the key subjects in American history, filling an important gap in the literature, with over 500 original essays.

Twenty-five essays, culled from the Journal of the History of Ideas, cover the unique participation of America in the international Enlightenment.

Readers who know the last new Thomas Jefferson, the one who appeared in the mid-20th century, will not recognize the man portrayed in this colorful book. Not only is the image different, the man who became enlightened in France is also different. This is the real man. "Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment: Paris - 1785" is a new kind of history. I call it a non-fiction narrative. It does not describe what Jefferson did in France. It takes the reader along as Jefferson does it. The reader comes to know the real man during eight divertissements in which French savant Pierre Cabanis shows the American Ambassador the city's most famous sites and buildings. In the course of these expeditions, Cabanis introduces his companion to the French Enlightenment.This knowledge is essential to Jefferson. The self-described "savage from the mountains of America" had gone went to France after the death of his wife to begin his life again. His plan was to become a new man in the form of a recent acquaintance, the marquis de Chastellux. To accomplish this transformation, Jefferson had not only to change his attire and his manners. He also had to learn the language of the French salons, which he intended to join.While accompanying Cabanis and Jefferson on their excursions through Paris in the summer of 1785, the reader sees a real person meeting real Frenchmen and learning to respond to them as a French sophisticate would do. With Cabanis' help, Jefferson grasped the French concept of Progress and came to see himself as its agent. This knowledge prepared him for the contest that lay ahead. Within a year of his return home, with the hepe of his Virginia neighbor, James Madison, he laid the foundations for a political party that would compete for power in America's first national campaign. During this ten-year process - Jefferson later referred to is as "the Second American Revolution" - the political loner who drafted the Declaration of Independence disappeared. Taking his place was an ambitious political partisan whose aim was to become the President of the United States of America.