America's Founding Secret: What the Scottish Enlightenment Taught Our Founding Fathers

Easy read with insights into some of our founding fathers and their education from Scottish scholars and the "Enlightenment" after many years of poverty and wars in Scotland. A good extension of "How the Scots Invented the Modern World" by Arthur Herman to help understand additional history on why America exists and it's founding principles. One key insight to America is the deliberate plan to foster commercial industry that can enrich the citizens and therefore support a limited government that sets and enforces the rules for that commerce. Individual freedom and the opportunity for prosperity based on intellectual contributions (copyright and patent laws) are fundemental to America and defined in the Constitution. This may be a blend of both books. Midlander

Robert W. Galvin is not the most eloquent writer, but his enthusiasm for his subject matter makes up for the excess use of passive voice in America's Founding Secret. The Scottish Enlightenment was a wonderful and exciting period in history and the Scots had a major influence on the Founding Fathers. Galvin enthusiastically and accurately relates this information in a series of short essays. This book would be a good choice to introduce a somewhat reluctant reader to this subject before exposing them to longer works such as Alexander Broadie's The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation or Arthur Herman's How The Scots Invented The Modern World. America's Founding Secret is evidence that someone outside of academia can get a charge out of heavy intellectual exercise. If buying/owning/reading a SHORT book bothers you, avoid this book and track down a copy of one of the other books mentioned in this review. If you want a short introduction to the Scottish Enlightenment and its effects on the founding of the United States, I recommend this book.

The Scottish Enlightenment was a period when some of the greatest scholars from almost every field were concentrated in one area that allowed a free flow of thought and information between them. Basically they were concentrated in the university communities of Glasgow and Edinburgh between 1720 and 1780. This free thinking influence spread to the colonies where people such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were schooled by Scottish teachers. A Scottish teacher, Francis Allison, taught three signers of the Declaration of Independence. The Scottish teachers realized that all nations of the time were founded or maintained by force. They suggested that a nation founded on commerce could be equally as powerful and influencial as those founded by force. This set the stage for the development of the philosophical underpinnings of the United States. All that was really needed now was a spark to set off the natural chain of events. During the time just prior to 1776 there was a multitude of writings from Scottish authors that proposed and defended the notion that oppressed people have a right to assert their independence. Between the strong writings calling for oppressed people to assert their independence and the belief that a country could be established based on commerce the scene was set for the establishment of the United States. The author provides substantial and convincing background information on exactly how all of this worked together the help create the Unites States. Details on what the Enlightenment was, how it came about and exactly how it influenced the actions of our forefathers and all there for the reader to learn and consider. An excellent treatise on the often overlooked contributions of the Scottish people to the formation of the United States, I found it a very informative book.