The Enlightenment Generation

The Enlightenment Generation was born during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. They are thought of as a protected, well-trained cohort that grew up while families prized good education, sound marriages, and social placement, then supplied America with many early professionals, political managers, and plantation administrators. Its name fits the larger intellectual atmosphere: this was the generation formed under the early eighteenth-century confidence that reason, law, commerce, learning, and orderly improvement could stabilize the Anglo-American world.