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American Enlightenment
| American Enlightenment | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1732–1845 | |||
 The United States Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia in June 1776, and ratified by the Second Continental Congress, on July 4, 1776, one of the most important and influential documents of the American Enlightenment | |||
| Including | American philosophy | ||
| Leader(s) | Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington | ||
Chronology
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| This article is part of a series on |
| Liberalism in the United States |
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The American Enlightenment was a period of intellectual and philosophical fervor in the thirteen American colonies in the 18th to 19th century, which led to the American Revolution and the creation of the United States. The American Enlightenment was influenced by the 17th- and 18th-century Age of Enlightenment in Europe and distinctive American philosophy. According to James MacGregor Burns, the spirit of the American Enlightenment was to give Enlightenment ideals a practical, useful form in the life of the nation and its people.[1]
A non-denominational moral philosophy replaced theology in many college curricula. Some colleges reformed their curricula to include natural philosophy (science), modern astronomy, and mathematics, and "new-model" American-style colleges were founded. Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon consent of the governed, equality under the law, liberty, republicanism and religious tolerance, as clearly expressed in the United States Declaration of Independence.
Among the foremost representatives of the American Enlightenment were presidents of colleges, including Puritan religious leaders Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Clap, and Ezra Stiles, Presbyterian minister and college president John Witherspoon, and Anglican moral philosophers Samuel Johnson and William Smith. Leading political thinkers were John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Paine, George Mason, James Wilson, Ethan Allen, and Alexander Hamilton, and polymaths Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.
The term "American Enlightenment" was coined in the post-World War II era and was not used in the 18th century when English speakers commonly referred to a process of becoming "enlightened."[2][3]
- ^ Burns, James MacGregor (2013). Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World. Macmillan. p. 132. ISBN 978-1-250-02490-9.
- ^ Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason, Yale University Press, 2016
- ^ Winterer, What Was the American Enlightenment? in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, eds. Joel Isaac, James Kloppenberg, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Oxford University Press, 2016
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