The Scottish Enlightenment was a period of feverish intellectual and scientific progress, in a country previously considered to be marginal to the European intellectual scene. Yet the enlightenment was not about politeness or civic humanism, but something more basic - the making of a society which c[...]

The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman's petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation's history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement. The Trans[...]