I see the American enlightenment as a kaleidoscope.
As a multifaceted series of transformations.
In the realm of nature and science and religion, in society,
in conceptions of human nature and government.
[MUSIC]
The American Enlightenment was very broad gauged series of intellectual,
cultural and artistic transformations that occurred
in North America during what I call the long 18th century.
They didn't occur in isolation,
they occurred in conversation with other parts of the Americas.
And especially with Europe.
This was a moment of revolution.
In thinking about almost every realm of the human experience,
in thinking about the place of humans in society, of humans in outer space,
of, of the ways that we should organize our politic.
It's really the birth of the modern world, and
in fact it's also the birth of the humanities.
This is really when Americans begin to think in a very different and
more secular way about the project of intellectual exploration.
I don't see the American Enlightenment as a, a single event.
I don't see it as being collapsed in the great moment of the American Revolution,
and the great documents such as the Declaration of Independence.
Although of course,
those were an essential part of the American Enlightenment.
[MUSIC]
My own view is that the enlightenment was a multi-centered event,
that it was ping-ponging across the Atlantic, ping-pong,
ping-ponging in different ways at different times, so some conversations.
For example, what are the Indians?
Where are they from?
These conversations were really robustly developed in the Americas,
because that's where you could do research on these questions.
You kno,wm I find that scholars of Europe have remained deeply invested.
In the Enlightenment as a European phenomenon.
There are many, many European scholars who work on the Enlightenment.
American scholars have tended not to, to go there.
There's been a lot of new ways of thinking about the past, the new, a lot of new
understandings about the formation of transatlantic communities of inquiry.
And we need to sort of play catch up.
And, and to, to get away from the idea that the enlightenment was a European
centered event that radiated outward into the colonies.
[MUSIC]
I purposely cast my net very broadly.
Obviously I'm going to be looking at political sources such as
the documents of the American Revolution, which was one of the first.
Great modern political revolutions in the name of Republicanism.
But I'm also looking in the realm of science.
So I'm looking at geological texts,
I'm looking at artistic material, material culture.
I'm looking at thoughts about slavery,
about Indians, and really casting broadly to find out what was particular
about North America during this long 18th Century that we call the enlightenment.
A productive day is when I, when I get to just wallow in my 18th Century source.
And try to put myself into the mindset of the past.
And read for example, you know, what it was like to think about slavery in 1700.
Versus what it was like to think about slavery in 1800.
And to think about the transformation in that way of thinking about slavery.
So I'm really especially interested in intellectual transformation.
Why is it people think about about their world one way, at a certain time?
And why do they change their minds?
I'm fascinated by why people change their minds.
[MUSIC]
>> For many Americans the Revolution, the American Revolution and
the enlightenment that it was part of is the founding
moment of the national experience.
And if they were to trace a genealogy of themselves.
As Americans into the past
they would very likely trace it to that moment in the 18th century.
For that reason,
I think that every generation needs to think about the American enlightenment.
Because it's in some ways the beginning of our, our national story.
And we'll tell it to ourselves in a different way
then somebody a generation ago would have told it to themselves.
Every generation has their own American enlightenment, so
I'm trying to write that story for my generation.
The United States is one of the longest
term successful republics in the history of the world.
And it is not that by accident.
It is that because of the insistence on open public dialogue
about the great questions of sustaining a republic,
and a democracy, and the humanities form an essential part of.
The stability and greatness of America democracy.
Humanities scholars are essential to the project of American democracy because
they help us to think through very complex questions about the human experience.
>> [MUSIC]