Author: Robert A. Ferguson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674023222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
This concise literary history of the American Enlightenment captures the varied and conflicting voices of religious and political conviction in the decades when the new nation was formed. Robert Ferguson's trenchant interpretation yields new understanding of this pivotal period for American culture.
Author: Caroline Winterer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300224567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
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.
Author: George Marsden
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465069770
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular, liberal elites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course. Their failure lost them the faith of their constituents, paving the way for a Christian revival that offered America a firm new moral vision -- one rooted in the Protestant values of the founders. A groundbreaking reappraisal of the country's spiritual reawakening, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment shows how America found new purpose at the dawn of the Cold War.
Author: Caroline Winterer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780911221459
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 52
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Book Description
Author: Craig Hazen
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252068287
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The Village Enlightenment in America focuses on three nineteenth-century spiritual activists who epitomized the marriage of science and religion fostered in antebellum, pre-Darwinian America by the American Enlightenment. A theologian, writer, and apologist for the nascent Mormon movement, as well as an amateur scientist, Orson Pratt wrote Key to the Universe, or a New Theory of Its Mechanism, to establish a scientific base for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Robert Hare, an inventor and ardent convert to spiritualism, used his scientific expertise to lend credence to the spiritualist movement. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, generally considered the initiator of the American mind-cure movement, developed an overtly religious concept of science and used it to justify his system of theology. Pratt, Hare, and Quimby all employed a potent combination of popular science and Baconianism to legitimate their new religious ideas. Using the same terms--matter, ether, magnetic force--to account for the behavior of particles, planetary rotation, and the influence of the Holy Ghost, these agents of the Enlightenment constructed complex systems intended to demonstrate a fundamental harmony between the physical and the metaphysical. Through the lives and work of these three influential men, The Village Enlightenment in America opens a window to a time when science and religion, instead of seeming fundamentally at odds with each other, appeared entirely reconcilable.
Author: Leigh Eric Schmidt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674009983
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
ÒFaith cometh by hearingÓÑso said Saint Paul, and devoted Christians from Augustine to Luther down to the present have placed particular emphasis on spiritual arts of listening. In quiet retreats for prayer, in the noisy exercises of Protestant revivalism, in the mystical pursuit of the voices of angels, Christians have listened for a divine call. But what happened when the ear tuned to GodÕs voice found itself under the inspection of Enlightenment critics? This book takes us into the ensuing debate about Òhearing thingsÓÑan intense, entertaining, even spectacular exchange over the auditory immediacy of popular Christian piety. The struggle was one of encyclopedic range, and Leigh Eric Schmidt conducts us through natural histories of the oracles, anatomies of the diseased ear, psychologies of the unsound mind, acoustic technologies (from speaking trumpets to talking machines), philosophical regimens for educating the senses, and rational recreations elaborated from natural magic, notably ventriloquism and speaking statues. Hearing Things enters this labyrinthÑall the new disciplines and pleasures of the modern earÑto explore the fate of Christian listening during the Enlightenment and its aftermath. In SchmidtÕs analysis the reimagining of hearing was instrumental in constituting religion itself as an object of study and suspicion. The mysticÕs ear was hardly lost, but it was now marked deeply with imposture and illusion.
Author: Alfred Owen Aldridge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
"Previous scholarship held that the image of China did not penetrate North America until after trade was established between Canton and the East Coast in 1784. In The Dragon and the Eagle, A. Owen Aldridge reveals that a lively curiosity about oriental culture existed before the middle of the eighteenth century, and that a good deal of information about it was available even during the War for Independence." "Aldridge surveys attitudes and opinions about all aspects of Chinese life and culture expressed in American fiction, history, travel accounts, sermons, poetry, essays, correspondence, memoirs, and references in periodicals. He indicates that between 1760 and 1825 several entire books about China were published in America, together with a host of short pieces in newspapers and magazines. By the end of the eighteenth century, practically every idea or element of concrete information about China in print in London or Paris had reappeared in some form or another in the United States." "The history of these initial dealings shows in many ways a clash of contrasting cultures. This book uncovers some extraordinary instances of the relationship: Benjamin Franklin at the age of thirty-two publishing in his Philadelphia newspaper an analysis of the thought of Confucius; Thomas Jefferson including a Chinese novel on a reading list of 200 books for his brother-in-law; Thomas Paine comparing Confucius and Christ as great moral teachers; Philip Freneau composing a poem hailing the first voyage of an American vessel to the Far East; the American Philosophical Society enquiring into the contents of a Chinese book unearthed in the midst of a camp of American Indians in Pennsylvania; and a shocked American sea captain viewing the corpses of Eurasian babies floating down the river in Canton." "Aldridge confines his remarks to literary and intellectual texts before the eighteenth century and emphasizes authors in English who have been previously neglected. A bibliography of American imprints referring to China, 1760 to 1826, appears in the appendix."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Craig Nelson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143112389
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
A fresh new look at the Enlightenment intellectual who became the most controversial of America's founding fathers Despite his being a founder of both the United States and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase "United States of America," and the author of Common Sense, Thomas Paine is the least well known of America's founding fathers. This edifying biography by Craig Nelson traces Paine's path from his years as a London mechanic, through his emergence as the voice of revolutionary fervor on two continents, to his final days in the throes of dementia. By acquainting us as never before with this complex and combative genius, Nelson rescues a giant from obscurity-and gives us a fascinating work of history.
Author: Richard B. Sher
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226752542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 842
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Book Description
The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.
Author: Carl J. Richard
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674314269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
The influence of Greek and Roman authors on our American forefathers finally becomes clear in this fascinating book—the first comprehensive study of the founders’ classical reading.
