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Description of  Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition (Jeffersonian America)

0813951194 epub The vital influence of Black American intellectuals on the legacy of Thomas Jeffersons ideas The lofty Enlightenment principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, so central to conceptions of the American founding, did not emerge fully formed as a coherent set of ideas in the eighteenth century. As Hannah Spahn argues in this important book, no group had a more profound influence on their development and reception than Black intellectuals. The rationalism and universalism most associated with Jefferson today, she shows, actually sprang from critical engagements with his thought by writers such as David Walker, Lemuel Haynes, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Read more