Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning...

An Imperial Japanese Army regiment surrenders to British forces in Burma at the close of World War II and finds harmony through song. A private, thought to be dead, disguises himself as a Buddhist monk and stumbles upon spiritual enlightenment.

The young Benjamin Franklin sought his fortune on a trip to England, but instead discovered a world of intellectual ferment in the coffeehouses and salons of London. He brought home to Philadelphia the intense hunger for knowledge that buzzed in a Europe where Newton, Bacon and Galileo had made epochal discoveries. With the "first Drudgery" of settling the American colonies now behind them, Franklin announced in 1743, it was high time that the colonists...

History should not be written with one eye cocked on the passing scene. These essays, written over a period of years, were not designed as current commentary; they attempt, rather, to recreate and if possible illuminate the American past in its own terms. But an introduction may be indulged in greater latitude than the essays themselves, for it is an amiable literary fiction that introductions are prefatory rather than conclusive. Here, then, I can...

It has long been taken for granted that the ideas of the European Enlightenment--of men like Locke, Hume, Voltaire, or Rousseau--profoundly affected America during the Revolutionary age. Yet there has been no full-length analysis of the movement of ideas from Europe to America in the late 18th century. Now one of American's leading intellectual historians has written a magisterial book that fills the gap. May defines the Enlightenment broadly. Men...