As the United States has developed as a nation, so too has its educational system. As the colonies rebelled from Britain, their initial reliance on European educational models and philosophies was replaced by a greater focus on the Enlightenment, republicanism, and the influence of such prominent Americans as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, and Noah Webster.
Over the last thirty years, postcolonial critiques of European imperial practices have transformed our understanding of colonial ideology, resistance, and cultural contact. The Enlightenment has played a complex but often unacknowledged role in this discussion, alternately reviled and venerated as the harbinger of colonial dominion and avatar of liberation, as target and shield, as shadow and light. This volume brings together two arenas - eighteenth-century studies and postcolonial theory - in order to interrogate the role and reputation of Enlightenment in the context of early European colonial ambitions and postcolonial interrogations of Western imperial aspirations.
A comprehensive yet accessible resource on this time period, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, Revised Edition is a valuable and unique tool for students and the general public. Still the only one-volume encyclopedia on this intensively studied subject, the revised edition has been substantially expanded and thoroughly updated to include recent scholarship. In particular, the volume now covers a greater geographical area and a more diverse group of historical figures. Building on the foundation of the successful previous edition, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, Revised Edition addresses a core subject of the school curriculum. With broad cultural and geographical coverage, this valuable and authoritative reference features articles on general topics such as science, education, art and architecture, aesthetics, and music; personalities; countries; notable works; and concepts. For the revised edition, many of the core entries have been expanded, and all articles have been revised and updated based on current research. New material includes approximately 125 new entries, new illustrations, further reading lists with all major articles, a new preface, and a revised chronology, bibliography, and index.
Written with wit and exuberance by longtime friends and accomplished historians Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, Blindspot weaves together invention with actual historical documents in an affectionate send-up of the best of eighteenth-century fiction, from epistolary novels like Richardson’s Clarissa to Sterne’s picaresque Tristram Shandy. Prodigiously learned, beautifully crafted, and lush with the bawdy, romping sensibility of the age, Blindspot celebrates the art of the Enlightenment and the passion of the American Revolution by telling stories we know and those we don’t, stories of the everyday lives of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary time.
"His vast--and vastly impressive--book sets out to redefine the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe....Magnificent and magisterial, Radical Enlightenment will undoubtedly be one of the truly great historical works of the decade."--John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph
"[A] magnificent...study of the impact of Spinoza and his philosophy on European cultural history at the hinge of the 17th and 18th centuries....Sumptuous in the energy, clarity and breadth of its scholarship."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Mr. Israel's lucid, engrossing account of the Enlightenment's formative period explains why we want our intellectual histories rewritten for every generation, for this Enlightenment overflows with our favorite things."--The Scriblerian
