2019: Twenty-Fourth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture
Was There an American Enlightenment?
Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities
Director, Stanford Humanities Center
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Classics
Stanford University
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.
Date: tbd
Location: tbd
Caroline Winterer is Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. She is an American historian, with special expertise in American thought and culture. Her most recent book is American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale, 2016). Winterer’s other books include The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 (2007) and The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (2002).
For mapping the social network of Benjamin Franklin she received an American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian Institution; an article about the project appeared in Smithsonian Magazine(Dec. 2013). She has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Spencer Foundation, among others. She has published peer-reviewed articles in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Modern Intellectual History. Winterer has also curated two exhibits of rare books and artifacts: Ancient Rome & America at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia (2010) and also The American Enlightenment at the Stanford Library (2011).
Image: Thomas Rowlandson after G.M. Woodward
Iohn Bull Making Observations on the Comet, 1807