This is a collection of essays, mainly written in the 1980s, by one of America's leading historians. Bringing together in one volume May's major interests, there are essays on the Constitution and the Enlightenment, Jefferson and the Enlightenment, the `Jefferson Moment' in the Enlightenment, and Franklin in the Enlightenment, and on Jonathan Edwards, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Calvinism in America, Rheinhold Niebuhr, and `reflections on the uneasy relation' between religion and American intellectual history.