What we are looking for is a well-informed, nicely-written, and lively discussion that historicizes contemporary questions and disputes in 18th century debates.

Your choices are designedly wide open: I want you to take what we have learned on enlightenment in our class readings(David Wootton, Power, Pleasure, and
Profit: Insatiable Appetites From Machiavelli to Madison (Harvard
University Press, 2018).

John Fea, The Way of Improvement
Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America
(Philadelphia, 2008)

Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley:
Biography of a Genius in Bondage (University of Georgia Press, 2014).
You might consider any number of concepts or practices and how they have changed over time, from public education to disability rights, or sports and the idea of national character. What we are looking for is a well-informed, nicely-written, and lively discussion that historicizes contemporary questions and disputes in 18th century debates.
Possible topics/questions could include the following,
Has the eighteenth-century notion of humanitarianism changed over time?
How does the Enlightenment notion of cosmopolitanism relate to modern debates on multiculturalism, nationalism, foreign policy?
How are eighteenth-century ideas/views of — pick a topic — still evident in modern debates relating to social and political life?
Compare and contrast the notion of political equality imagined in the eighteenth century, with what it has come to mean in our own time.
How and with what consequences has the public/social meaning of happiness changed from the eighteenth- through the twenty-first centuries?
How did eighteenth-century debates figure in the production of contemporary notions of race and social difference?
How does the eighteenth-century notion of commercial society and the common good relate to capitalism and its concern for growth?
Is contemporary capitalism antithetical to the liberal politics imagined by the founders?
Or, alternatively, how is contemporary capitalism essential to the notion of liberty and public happiness expounded in the Declaration of Independence?

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