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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 a critical precursor of the American Revolution. Chief among the ideas of the American Enlightenment were the concepts of natural law, natural rights, consent of the governed, individualism, property rights, self-ownership, self-determination, liberalism, republicanism, and defense against corruption.
[2] [3] He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), two of the most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he helped to inspire the colonial era patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. [4] His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of human rights. [5]
By the late Enlightenment, there was a rising demand for a more universal approach to education, particularly after the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The predominant educational psychology from the 1750s onward, especially in northern European countries, was associationism : the notion that the mind associates or dissociates ...
In the expanded 1961-62 version of Bernard Bailyn's 1960 conference paper, "Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America", the oft-cited first footnote contained a multitude of studies that contributed to the article and Ideological Origins, including those by Forrest McDonald, Caroline Robbins, Edmund Morgan ...
Historians categorize the time of the American Revolution as part of a broader American Enlightenment, in which the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment began to influence American science and philosophy. [100] [104] This included a shift away from religious groundings in philosophy.
The twelve letters were widely read and reprinted throughout the Thirteen Colonies, and were important in uniting the colonists against the Townshend Acts in the run-up to the American Revolution. According to many historians, the impact of the Letters on the colonies was unmatched until the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776. [1]
A generation later their arguments immensely influenced the ideals of the American Revolution. According to Peter Karsten's Patriot-Heroes in England and America, Cato's Letters were the most common holdings on the bookcases of the founding fathers. [3] These letters also provided inspiration and ideals for the American Revolutionary generation.