Hume’s Reception in Early America

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain’s greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section.

From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book’s contents come from a wide variety of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references.

Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates.

Mark G. Spencer is Associate Professor of History at Brock University, Canada. He is the author of David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (2005) and has edited eleven volumes, including David Hume: Historical Thinker, Historical Writer (2013) and The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of American Enlightenment (2015).