Caroline Winterer’s lecture “Was There an American Enlightenment?” on April 4 drew an audience of more than 100 people to the Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall. Professor Winterer traced the scholarship on the topic of the American Enlightenment through the mid-twentieth century and demonstrated how those writings actually reflected anxieties around the cold war. She looked at the correspondence networks and the circulation of texts between America and Europe during the eighteenth century and considered their influences and development of shared interests. Caroline Winterer’s lecture “Was There an American Enlightenment?” on April 4 drew an audience of more than 100 people. Professor Winterer posited that there was indeed an American Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, but instead of being a unified patriotic past as imagined in the mid-twentieth century, it was a complex blend of optimistic ideas reflecting a variety of intellectual and philosophical influences that positioned the people to realize their potential. Professor Winterer is the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities, and Director, Stanford Humanities Center and author of American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale, 2016). Her talk was the twenty-fourth in the series of Lewis Walpole Library Lectures for which the Library’s faculty director, currently Jonathan Kramnick, selects a prominent scholar in the field to speak at Yale on some aspect of eighteenth-century studies. The lecture was followed by a reception in the library court. Photos of the talk and reception.