登入
選單
返回
Google圖書搜尋
Fire and Light
James MacGregor Burns
其他書名
How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World
出版
Macmillan
, 2013-10-29
主題
Philosophy / History & Surveys / Modern
History / Modern / 18th Century
History / Europe / Western
History / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775)
History / United States / Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN
1250024900
9781250024909
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=oagaz4yvHOEC&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBook
SAMPLE
註釋
The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explores history’s most daring and transformational intellectual movement, the European and American Enlightenment.
In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World. They transformed thought, overturned governments, and inspired visionary political experiments.
Fire and Light
brings to life the revolutionary leaders who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, created the modern world. Burns traces the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment to men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles.
Today the same principles have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab world, in the former Soviet Union, and in China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead, and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns’s exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions.
Praise for
Fire and Light
“With this profound and magnificent book, Burns takes us into the fire’s center. . . . Essential for deciphering the challenges of the world we will live in tomorrow.” —Michael Beschloss,
New York Times
–bestselling author of
Presidential Courage
“James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and
Fire and Light
is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America—for better and for worse—what it is.” —Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of
Revolutionary Summer
“[A] captivating tale. . . . Briskly and beautifully told. . . . Superb.” —
Publishers Weekly
