History

Term applied to the mainstream of thought of 18th-century Europe and America. The scientific and intellectual developments of the 17th century.

In philosophy, a theory that holds that reason alone, unaided by experience, can arrive at basic truth regarding the world.

Modern epistemology is the theory of how knowledge is possible, and is especially important in the history of science, where different paradigms of knowledge (Kuhn 1970) correspond to different scientific epoques: the age of Newton, the age of Einstein and quantum mechanics.

The work of the French Encyclopedists, or philosophes.

An epistemologist and political philosopher.

French philosopher and writer who won early fame as a playwright and poet and later was an influential popularizer of Newtonian natural philosophy.

Viscount St. Albans, politician, author, and natural historian.

With enough modest inherited wealth to live as he chose, he spent his life in travel, on his work in philosophy, mathematics, physics and physiology and as a soldier serving in Holland, Bohemia and Hungary.

English physicist and mathematician who is regarded as one of the greatest scientists ever to have lived.

A riot on 5 March 1770, arising from the resentment of Boston citizens against British troops quartered in the city.

American patriots, disguised as Mohawks, dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773, in protest against the British Tea Act.

First skirmish of the American Revolution.

The battles in and around New York City in the summer and fall of 1776 had gone badly for the American revolutionaries. The British had taken the city and established posts across from New York in New Jersey and up the Hudson River. Meanwhile, General George Washington knew that the enlistments of many of his few remaining troops would end on December 31, 1776. He needed a victory both to support the patriot cause and to maintain his army.

On October 6, 1781, the British, French, and American armies converged around Yorktown, Virginia, for what would be the final and decisive battle of the American War of Independence.

Full and formal declaration adopted July 4, 1776, by representatives of the Thirteen Colonies in North America announcing the separation of those colonies from Great Britain and making them into the United States.

Fiscal crises and years of feudal repression were among factors leading to a revolution in France (1789–1799) marked by the storming of the Bastille, the guillotining of Louis XVI, and the Reign of Terror. Although the revolution abolished legal privilege based on birth and guaranteed freedom of religion, its legacy is ambiguous; gains must be seen in the context of the suffering produced by denunciations, purges, executions, and war.

Patriotic political club of the French Revolution.

Wars occurring in the era of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, the decade of 1792-1802. The wars began as an effort to defend the Revolution and developed into wars of conquest under the empire

Queen of France, wife of King Louis XVI and daughter of Austrian Archduchess Maria Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I.

Swiss-born French Revolutionary leader, physician, and journalist.

French statesman and one of the leading figures of the French Revolution.

Leader of the Jacobins and one of the leading figures of the French Revolution.

From 1793-94, a period of the French Revolution characterized by a wave of executions of presumed enemies of the state. Directed by the Committee of Public Safety, the Revolutionary government's Terror was essentially a war dictatorship, instituted to rule the country in a national emergency.