Event time:
Thursday, April 4, 2019 - 5:30pm
Location:
Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall
1080 Chapel Street
New Haven , CT
Event description:
2019: Twenty-Fourth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture
Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities, and
Director, Stanford Humanities Center
The American Enlightenment is often viewed as a singular era bursting with new ideas as the U.S. sought to assert itself in a new republic free of the British monarchy. In this talk, Stanford historian Caroline Winterer shows how the myth and romanticization of an American Enlightenment was invented during the Cold War to calm fears of totalitarianism overseas. She’ll then look behind the 20th-century mythology, rescuing a “real” eighteenth-century American Enlightenment that is far different than the one we usually imagine.