Carl Lotus Becker (1873–1945) was an American historian. He was born in Waterloo, Black Hawk County, Iowa. He studied at the University of Wisconsin. Frederick Jackson Turner was his doctorial advisor there. Becker got his Ph.D. in 1907. 1873 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calaber). ... 1945 (MCMXLV) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1945 calendar). ... Waterloo is the county seat of Black Hawk County, Iowa, United States. ... Black Hawk County is a county located in the northeastern part of U.S. state of Iowa. ... The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public university located in Madison, Wisconsin. ... Frederick Jackson Turner Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861–1932) was, with Charles A. Beard, the most influential American historian of the early 20th century. ... Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. ...

He was John Wendell Anderson Professor of History at Cornell University from 1917 to 1941. This is about the university. ...

He is best known for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University. His assertion that philosophes in the 'Age of Reason', relied far more upon Christian assumptions than they cared to admit, is now widely accepted. It is an influential work, which has also subsequently been much attacked. Interest in it is partly explained by this passage (p. 47): ... The Philosophes (French for Philosophers) were a group of French thinkers of the 18th century Enlightenment. ...

In the thirteeth century the key words would no doubt be God, sin, grace, salvation, heaven and the like; in the nineteenth century, matter, fact, matter-of-fact, evolution, progress; in the twentieth century, relativity, process, adjustment, function, complex. In the eighteenth century the words without which no enlightened person could reach a restful conclusion were nature, natural law, first cause, reason, sentiment, humanity, perfectibility [...].

This isolation of vocabularies of the epoch chimes with much later work, even if the rest of the book is essayistic in approach.

Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House. A residential college is an organisational pattern for a division of a university that places academic activity in a community setting of students and faculty, usually at a residence and with shared meals, the college having a degree of autonomy and a federated relationship with the overall university. ... Carl Becker House or Becker House, founded in 2005, is the second of five new residential colleges at Cornell University. ...

Works

• The Beginnings of the American People (1915)
• The Eve of the Revolution (1918)
• The Declaration of Independence (1922)
• The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932)
• Everyman His Own Historian (1935)

References

• Carl Becker: On History & the Climate of Opinion (1956) Charlotte W. Smith
• The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (1958) Cushing Strout
• Carl Becker: A Biographical Study in American Intellectual History (1961) Burleigh T. Wilkins

Cushing Strout is an American intellectual historian. ...

External links

• Historiographical Blurb and JSTOR listing [1]
• Works by Carl Lotus Becker at Project Gutenberg