Teaching American Philosophy
This timeline establishes the intellectual and cultural contexts in which these American philosophers wrote and lived.
1703-10-05 00:00:00
1703: Jonathan Edwards is born
Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, in the village of East Windsor, Connecticut, in the Connecticut River Valley, an area that at the time was considered the western edge of America.
1703-10-06 00:00:00
1703: Puritan home and hearth
Edwards's homes were built in standard Puritan design.
1716-06-01 03:21:50
1716: Edwards enters Yale College
Edwards enters Yale College in 1716 at the age of 13
1720-06-01 03:21:50
1720: Edwards writes "Of Insects"
When he was a 16-year-old student at Yale University, Edwards wrote this brilliant short set of observations on the behavior of spiders.
1721-06-01 00:00:00
1721: Edwards has a religious conversion
Edwards had a religious conversion--an experience of receiving God's grace--in Enfield Woods in 1721.
1726-06-01 00:00:00
1726: Solomon Stoddard
Edwards becomes minister of Northampton Church, working under his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard (1643-1729).
1728-06-01 00:00:00
1728: Edwards marries
Edwards marries Sarah Pierpont in Northampton in 1728.
1729-06-01 00:00:00
1729: Solomon Stoddard dies
Solomon Stoddard dies after serving as pastor of Northampton Church for over fifty years.
1729-06-01 00:00:00
1729: Edwards's study
When Stoddard died, Edwards became full minister of Northampton Church.
1734-06-01 00:00:00
1734: Divine & Supernatural Light
In the sermon "A Divine and Supernatural Light," Edwards reflects on his conversion experience to develop a formal account of the nature of religious knowledge as a kind of personal feeling that burns in one's soul.
1734-06-01 00:00:00
1734-1743: The Great Awakening
The Great Awakening was a period of intense religious revivals that began in Northampton in 1734 and spread through much of western New England in the mid-1740s.
1737-06-01 00:00:00
1737: Edwards on the Great Awakening
Edwards writes "A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton," a description of the religious revivals in western Connecticut that insists that knowing God means feeling his presence, or having a sense of what Edwards calls "inward sweetness."
1741-06-01 00:00:00
1741: George Whitefield preaches revivalism
George Whitefield, a revivalist minister from England, preached in western New England and much of the Northeast throughout the 1740s.
1741-06-01 00:00:00
1741: A frightening sermon
Edwards preaches "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God."
1743-04-13 00:00:00
1743: Thomas Jefferson is born
Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, in rural Shadwell, Virginia.
1743-06-01 00:00:00
1743: Chauncy rejects Edwards
Charles Chauncy (1705–1787), the very influential minister of the First Church of Boston for 60 years, writes "Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England" (1743), a treatise that rejects Edwards's belief that religious insight is a personal experience of God and mocks his notion of the "religious affections."
1750-06-01 00:00:00
1750: Edwards dismissed as pastor
Edwards is dismissed as pastor of Northampton for his perceived inability to understand and tolerate human failings and for his repeated attempts to persuade his congregation to return to and follow the Puritan terms for church membership that Stoddard had overturned.
1751-06-01 00:00:00
1751: Edwards and the Mohawks
Edwards moves to Stockbridge, in western Massachusetts, where he serves as pastor and missionary to the Housatonic native people living there.
1754-06-15 08:32:38
1754: Edwards's Last Letter
See the last letter that Edwards wrote and an image of his burial place
1758-03-22 00:00:00
1758: Death of Edwards
Edwards died from a small pox inoculation just months after he was installed as President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).
1760-06-01 00:00:00
1760: Jefferson in college
Jefferson attends the College of William and Mary in 1760, studying the liberal arts and sciences and music.
1762-06-01 11:34:54
1762: Jefferson and the Enlightenment
At William and Mary, Jefferson reads John Locke (1632-1704), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the Enlightenment thinkers who would shape his lifelong commitment to rational inquiry into nature, morality, and politics.
1765-05-27 00:00:00
1765: A prayer in Mohawk
May 27, 1765, Edwards's son writes a prayer in the Mohawk language, Mahican. Edwards and his son had studied this Algonquin language spoken by the Housatonic people.
1768-06-01 00:00:00
1768: Jefferson builds Monticello
In 1764 at the age of 21, Jefferson inherited 2,750 acres of his father's land in and around Shadwell, Virginia. In 1768, he began building Monticello, his permanent home, on a mountain near Shadwell.
1770-06-01 00:00:00
1770: Slavery at Monticello
Monticello is also a testament to Jefferson's participation in slavery.
1772-01-01 00:00:00
1772: Jefferson marries
Jefferson marries Martha Wayles Skelton (1748-1782), the daughter of a fellow plantation owner, on January 1, 1772.
1776-07-04 00:00:00
1776: Declaration of Independence
On July 4, 1776, Jefferson's final version of the Declaration of Independence is adopted by the U.S. Congress in Philadelphia, PA.
1777-06-01 00:00:00
1777: Religious Freedom Bill
By the late 1770s, Jefferson was convinced that religion must be a private and not a public matter.
1779-06-01 00:00:00
1779: Jefferson as governor
In 1779 Jefferson becomes Governor of Virginia.
1779-06-01 00:00:00
1779: The Virginia Religious Freedom Act
The "Virginia Religious Freedom Act," a revision of Jefferson's earlier "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom" (1777), is adopted by the Virginia General Assembly in 1779.
1785-06-01 00:00:00
1785: Notes on the State of Virginia
Jefferson wrote this book as a response to questions put to him in 1780 by Francois Barbe-Marbois, the French delegate to United States during the Revolutionary War.
1787-06-01 00:00:00
1787: The American Constitution
On September 17, 1787, the Constitution of the United States was signed at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
1787-06-01 00:00:00
1787: Jefferson argues for a Bill of Rights
Concerned that the recently passed Constitution needed a separate section outlining the rights of individuals, Jefferson urged James Madison to add a Bill of Rights.
1788-06-01 00:00:00
1788: James Madison considers Bill of Rights
Madison has misgivings about adding a bill of rights to the Constitution.
1789-06-01 00:00:00
1789: The Bill of Rights
The Bill of Rights is passed at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
1797-06-01 00:00:00
1797: Jefferson and the Philosophical Society
From 1797-1815, Jefferson served as President of the American Philosophical Society, an organization begun by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 that still exists today.
1800-06-01 00:00:00
1800: Rush opposes Jefferson
Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), scientist, doctor, former Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress, and also a New Light in the tradition of Jonathan Edwards, writes in a letter to Jefferson that "Christianity [is] the strong ground of Republicanism."
1801-06-01 00:00:00
1801: Jefferson becomes President
Jefferson becomes third President of the United States, serving two terms through 1809. He rejects pleas to serve a third term and retires to Monticello.
1802-06-01 00:00:00
1802: Sally Hemings
In 1802, a Richmond, Virginia, newspaper alleged that Jefferson had several children with Sally Hemings, a slave he had inherited from his father-in-law, John Wayles, in 1774.
1803-05-05 00:00:00
1803: Ralph Waldo Emerson born
Ralph Waldo Emerson is born on May 5, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts.
1804-06-01 00:00:00
1804: Lewis & Clark Expedition
Jefferson commissioned Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark to lead a group of army volunteers on an expedition through the territories newly acquired in the Louisiana Purchase (1803).
1817-05-11 05:23:51
1817: Emerson enters Harvard College
Emerson enters Harvard College in 1817 at the age of 14.
1818-06-01 00:00:00
1818: The University of Virginia
In a 1787 letter to Madison, Jefferson wrote: "I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty."
1820-06-01 00:00:00
1820: The Jefferson Bible
Begun in 1800 in response to Benjamin Rush's request that he describe his private religious views, Jefferson compiled his own bible, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, and English.
1820-06-01 00:00:00
1820: Minister Channing
At Harvard, Emerson is influenced by William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), a leading spokesman in the Unitarian Controversy.
1824-06-01 00:00:00
1824: Emerson's Aunt Mary
Emerson corresponded frequently with his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, whom he called "a force on his mind greater than the thinkers of Greece and Rome."
1826-07-04 00:00:00
July 4, 1826: Death of Jefferson
Jefferson dies at Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia.
1831-06-01 00:00:00
1831: Death of Emerson's wife
Emerson's first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson, dies of tuberculosis at age 19.
1832-06-01 00:00:00
1832: Emerson resigns as minister
Emerson preached the sermon "The Lord's Supper" as his final address as minister of Boston's Second Church. He explains his reasons for no longer being able to perform the sacrament of "The Lord's Supper," one of his primary ecclesiastical duties.
1833-06-01 00:00:00
1833: Emerson's conversion experience
Suffering a spiritual and vocational crisis, Emerson travels through Europe for nearly a year.