Making The ‘Miracle’: Jonathan Mayhew And The Enlightenment In America by Robert Tracinski

Making The ‘Miracle’: Jonathan Mayhew And The Enlightenment In America by Robert Tracinski

Enlightenment ideas about reason, religious freedom, individual rights, and the right of revolution were not just notions Jefferson mused about alone in his library in Monticello. They were preached from the pulpit by popular figures like Mayhew for decades before 1776 and published in widely read pamphlets addressing the political controversies of the day. Mayhew gives us an idea of how Enlightenment ideas made it out into the minds of the American common man.

 I love this kind of look at the philosophical underpinnings of the American Experiment.