The Declaration of Independence: A Study In The History of Political Ideas

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 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. He also wrote The Beginnings of the American People (1915), The Eve of the Revolution: A Chronicle of the Breach with England (1918), and The Declaration of Independence (1922).