The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explores history’s most daring and transformational intellectual movement, the European and American Enlightenment.

“With this profound and magnificent book, Burns takes us into the fire’s center ... Essential for deciphering the challenges of the world we will live in tomorrow.” —Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidential Courage

American Transcendentalism is a comprehensive narrative history of America’s first group of public intellectuals, the men and women who defined American literature and indelibly marked American reform in the decades before and following the America Civil War. 

Learn why American founding father John Adams feared the political power of the rich—and how his ideas illuminate today's debates about inequality and its consequences.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, first published in 1944, is considered one of the most profound and relevant works by the influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and certainly the fullest statement of his political philosophy. Written and first read during the prolonged, tragic world war between totalitarian and democratic forces, Niebuhr’s book took up the timely question of how democracy as a political system could best be defended.