The Twilight of the American Enlightenment PDF Download

Author: George Marsden
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465030106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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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: 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 : 264

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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: 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: Frank Shuffelton
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9781878822246
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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

Author: Morris Berman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
An emerging cult classic about America's cultural meltdown--and a surprising solution. A prophetic examination of Western decline, "The Twilight of American Culture" provides one of the most caustic and surprising portraits of American society--and corporate mass mind culture-- to date.

Author: Laurie M. Johnson
Publisher: Honor and Obligation in Liberal Society: Problems and Prospects
ISBN: 9780739190470
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book analyzes Tocqueville's views on religion, family and gender roles, politics, relations with Native Americans, white southerners and slavery, and the military. It explores how these views can help form a uniquely American honor code, one that re-envisions aristocratic elements of honor within a modern democratic and capitalist society.

Author: Jose R. Torre
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto Publishers
ISBN: 9781781446171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1330

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Book Description
Given the significance the new world held in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers, it is remarkable that scholars have not more fully documented the Enlightenment in America. So far, the body of work on the American Enlightenment has focused almost exclusively on two areas, politics and religion. In contrast, scholars have paid little attention to the polyglot efforts of American doctors, scientists, engineers, botanists, poets and other Enlightenment actors. The Enlightenment in America fills this significant gap in the discourse. Americans did accept an early and moderate Enlightenment characterised by the work of Locke and Newton. The collection highlights the uniquely functional nature of the Enlightenment in America. For Enlightenment era, thinkers knowledge could not be divorced from utility. This goal seems to have been most fully realized in the United States. By highlighting both the material and intellectual elements of the Enlightenment, The Enlightenment in America helps to redefine the Enlightenment as more than an intellectual idea. This book was recognized by CHOICE magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title, 2009

Author: Jim Belcher
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830847650
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
America's political landscape is experiencing dangerous polarization and fragmentation, with the extremes pulling the country apart. Voices on the left and right clash over different worldviews, definitions of America, and what it means to be an American citizen. The levels of incivility and hostility lead some to invoke the language of a cold civil war or even a looming civil war: one that could split the country in two. Is there any way to step back from this dangerous precipice? Political philosopher Jim Belcher shows that this is not merely a binary opposition between conservativism on the right and liberalism on the left, but also between conflicting visions of order and freedom on both sides. Through his unique quadrant framework, Belcher traces the people and movements in each position, examines their underlying narratives, and articulates their respective contributions and dangers. This quadrant framework not only reveals how polarization divides us but also shows us how to move beyond the right-left stalemate. At the core of the competing visions are the seeds of a new vital center, a robust and surprising model that has the ability to transcend political tribalism and bring America back together again before it is too late.

Author: Henry Farnham May
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
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.