The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution

by Trevor Colbourn

Overview

In a landmark work, a leading scholar of the eighteenth century examines the ways in which an understanding of the nature of history influenced the thinking of the founding fathers.

As Jack P. Greene has observed, “[The Whig] conception saw the past as a continual struggle between liberty and virtue on one hand and arbitrary power and corruption on the other.” Many founders found in this intellectual tradition what Josiah Quincy, Jr., called the “true old English liberty,” and it was this Whig tradition—this conception of liberty—that the champions of American independence and crafters of the new republic sought to perpetuate. Colbourn supports his thesis—that “Independence was in large measure the product of the historical concepts of the men who made it”—by documenting what books were read most widely by the founding generation. He also cites diaries, personal correspondence, newspapers, and legislative records.

Trevor Colbourn is President Emeritus of the University of Central Florida.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781614871248
Publisher:	Liberty Fund, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/31/1998
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	380 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

Preface to the Liberty Fund Edition:
1943 and All That
xi

Preface to the 1965 Edition
xxi

Part One The English Heritage and the
Colonial Historical View

CHAPTER I History and the Eighteenth-Century Colonist
3

CHAPTER II The Colonial Perspective: Ancient and Medieval
25

CHAPTER III The Colonial Perspective: Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanoverians
48

Part Two The Revolutionary Use of History

CHAPTER IV The New England Historical Conscience
71

CHAPTER V John Adams: Political Scientist as Historian
100

CHAPTER VI Three Pennsylvanians: John Dickinson, James Wilson, Benjamin Franklin
129

CHAPTER VII The Historical Mind of the South
163

CHAPTER VIII Thomas Jefferson and the Rights
of Expatriated Men
193

CHAPTER IX The Whig Historical Tradition
and the Origins of the American Revolution
226

Appendices

I The Saxon Myth Dies Hard
237

II History in the Colonial Library
245

Index

Editorial Reviews

 …a joy to read.

— Lucius F. Ellsworth

From the Publisher