Fostering Civil Discourse Series: American Ideals and American Thought-Liberalism and Republicanism in the American Revolution

Join the Clark County Public Library for a lecture series that celebrates and explores America's 250 years. This series is open to all but designed for professional development opportunities for social studies K-12 educators. Teachers can earn continuing education units (CEU) by attending the series.

This is the second in a four-part series. What did freedom mean for the American founders? Today freedom often sounds vague, meaning many different things to many different people, but the founders understood freedom in the context of concrete problems and concerns they inherited from earlier thinkers. To address this question, this talk offers an overview of the intellectual background of the American Revolution centered on the two most important intellectual traditions for the American founders, liberalism and republicanism. In it we will see how these two traditions, far from being opposed, were synthesized in the American Revolution and Constitution. Both were ultimately attempts by the founders to establish a political system that was not only based on freedom but could support it. As their goal was to create, in practice, what their intellectual forbearers had attempted to work out in theory, this genealogy still matters to us today. Thinkers discussed include Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Montesquieu, John Milton, James Harrington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison.”

Today's presenter is Dr. Andrew Wilkins, an historian and visiting faculty associate at Wright State University specializing in Colonial American, British, and Irish economic history and the intellectual roots of modernity. He earned a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He previously served as Postdoctoral Scholar in History with the Menard Family George Washington Forum at Ohio University, where he lectured on the Scottish Enlightenment and Adam Smith.

Registration is suggested but not required for this session. Register at the desk at the Houston Branch or call 937-462-8047.