Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity and invented many items which we still use today, including the lightning rod and bifocals, and immensely influenced Thomas Malthus’ rule of population growth. These discoveries, developments, inventions, and theories would play an immense role in the common Ind...
to refer to how the French became knowledgable after they realized their royalty were betraying and lying to them. After this, Western and Scandinavian Europe became enlightened with new ideas and designs. The French and Dutch created great works of art and inventions which still live on today....
. The use of the label ‘rationalist’ to characterize a world outlook which has no place for the supernatural is becoming less popular today; terms like ‘ humanist ‘ or ‘materialist’ seem largely to have taken its place. But the old usage still survives. Natural Rights Natural rights,...
Many shocking, new ideas shaped the American Experiment and related 18th century democratic ventures; as an historian of the period, I often notice that one of the most fundamental of them, and most shocking to a world which had so long assumed the opposite, often goes unmentioned — indeed ...
That is, as we know, the French Revolution, which starts in 1789 partly inspired, at least the intellectuals partly inspired by Rousseau's ideas developed to such a point, the French Revolution, unlike the American Revolution, went through as you may know several stages of increasing radicalism...
(Untergang) of the West. Similarities between the ideas of Kissinger and Spengler are far from coincidental, not least because the latter was the subject of the former’s honors thesis at Harvard. Titled “The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant,” the thesis ...
Updated Webster’s dictionaries are still standard today. Philip Freneau’s (1752-1832) was known as "the poet of the American Revolution". His major themes are death, nature, transition, and the human in nature. All of these themes become important in 19th century writing. All the while....
2.1 The American dream in Autobiography Autobiography is one of his best works that is still very popular and can be read today. It shows Benjamin Franklin as a man of versatile energy and new ideas, a man who represented American enlightenment and the fulfillment of American dream. “It is...
Scottish Enlightenment, theconjunctionof minds, ideas, and publications inScotlandduring the whole of the second half of the 18th century and extending over several decades on either side of that period. Contemporaries referred toEdinburghas a “hotbed of genius.”Voltairein 1762 wrote in characterist...
This date probably was the start of that remarkable period in the intellectual history of Europe that we call today “The Age of Enlightenment”. But the story of the beginning of that age went back many years. European universities and intellectual climate at that time were still dominated by...