The American Enlightenment

Catalog description

This course takes ideas seriously as a major inspiration for human activity: people are willing both to live and die for deeply held ideas. We’ll use the American Enlightenment to explore how a constellation of new, exciting, and dangerous ideas arose around the Atlantic World in the eighteenth century. These ideas challenged people’s most fundamental assumptions about reality: Who should govern us? What do we know—and how do we know it? How should we live together in society? What does it mean to be religious? What is natural—and what is unnatural? How should we raise and educated children? Most people associate the Enlightenment with Europe, but in this course we will explore how the specific conditions of eighteenth-century North America—slavery, the presence of large numbers of indigenous peoples, a colonial political context, and even local animals, rocks, and plants—also shaped the major questions and conversations of the time. We’ll examine how Enlightenment ideas directly influenced the American Revolution’s commitment to liberty, natural rights, separation of powers, and the pursuit of happiness (as embodied in such founding documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution). But we’ll also stray from politics to look at how Enlightenment ideas also crept into almost every other area as well, from ideas about child- rearing to maps to architecture. NYC: TBD