The Enlightenment Is Hard to Define

Intellectual Foundations of the American Revolution — Part I The Enlightenment is not as easy to define as we might expect—largely because the term itself was rarely used by the very thinkers we now group under it. In many ways, “the Enlightenment” is a label applied after the fact, used to describe a broad intellectual […]

Samuel Adams and the Question of Independence

On April 3, 1776—just three months before the Declaration of Independence—Samuel Adams wrote from Philadelphia, where he was serving as a Massachusetts delegate to the Second Continental Congress. In a letter to fellow Massachusetts native Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston, he posed a striking question: “Is not America already independent? Why then not declare it?” […]