The Eve of the Revolution: A Chronicle of the Breach with England (1918)

A title by Carl Lotus Becker who was an American historian. He studied at the University of Wisconsin and Frederick Jackson Turner was his doctoral advisor there. Becker got his Ph.D. in 1907. 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 has been influential, but has also been much attacked. In this brief sketch I have chiefly endeavored to convey to the reader, not a record of what men did, but a sense of how they thought and felt about what they did.