Revisits the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, paying particular attention to America's intellectual revolution, and explores the ideals and arguments that formed the United States and how they affect the world today.

Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments.