Curated category
Age of Enlightenment
- Age of EnlightenmentDare to know. That short Latin command, sapere aude, sits at the heart of an essay Immanuel Kant published in 1784, titled Answering the Question: What Is…
- Ludwig van BeethovenLudwig van Beethoven could no longer hear the applause his own music had earned. At the premiere on the 7th of May 1824, the contralto Caroline Unger had to…
- Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant lived so rigidly that his neighbors in Königsberg were said to set their watches by his daily walks. He was born Emanuel on the 22nd of April…
- Jean-Jacques RousseauJean-Jacques Rousseau came into the world barely breathing. "I was born almost dying, they had little hope of saving me," he later wrote of his arrival in…
- René DescartesRené Descartes opened his treatise on emotions, the Passions of the Soul, with a startling promise. He would write on the topic, he said, "as if no one had…
- Baroque musicBaroque music stretches across one hundred and fifty years of Western history, from roughly 1600 to 1750, and it gave the world opera, the modern orchestra…
- Corsican RepublicThe Corsican Republic came into being in July 1755, proclaimed on a Mediterranean island that most of Europe had long dismissed as a Genoese possession.
- Joseph HaydnJoseph Haydn once described himself as a man with no escape from his own mind. "Usually musical ideas are pursuing me, to the point of torture," he told his…
- 1775–1795 in Western fashionIn 1750, the consumer revolution brought about cheaper copies of fashionable styles. This shift allowed members of all classes to partake in fashionable…
- Francis BaconFrancis Bacon dictated his last letter from a borrowed bed in Highgate, his fingers, he wrote, so disjointed with sickness that he could not steadily hold a…
- Enlightened absolutismEnlightened absolutism sits at one of history's most uncomfortable intersections: absolute power dressed in the language of reason.
- Republic of LettersThe Republic of Letters was a long-distance intellectual community that stretched across Europe and the Americas in the late 17th and 18th centuries.
- Founding Fathers of the United StatesU.S. senator Warren G. Harding introduced the phrase Founding Fathers to Americans during his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention in 1916.
- Religious fanaticismReligious fanaticism carries a definition that cuts in two directions at once. On one side, it describes uncritical zeal or obsessive enthusiasm toward a…
- PolymathPolymath. The word itself comes from Greek: poly, meaning many, and manthanein, meaning to learn. But behind the etymology lies something more ambitious than…