Exploring the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on America’s founding

When many people think of the American revolutionary era, they envision it in terms of independence from England.

An underexplored side of the story, says fourth-year Eric Ryu, is about the influence of England’s northern neighbor, Scotland, on the Americas, particularly in the realm of education. For his history honors thesis, Ryu is studying the Scottish Enlightenment and how it played out in three Scottish universities that influenced early America.

“Contemporary scholars like to believe the Scottish Enlightenment is really unique and distinctively Scottish, that everyone is concerned about common sense and first principles,” says Ryu, who is triple-majoring in history, health and societies, and classics. “But the validity of these assumptions is far from clear.”

Ryu, from Rocklin, California, spent part of his summer working in the archives of the University of Glasgow, University of Edinburgh, and University of St Andrews. With support from the Gelfman International Summer Fund, Wolf Humanities Center, and Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, he traveled to Scotland to examine records from the 1750s to the 1820s.

Ryu’s archival work focused on student notes of faculty lectures and library lending lists from the period “to see how we can decenter the conversation away from just the Americas, away from just a couple of influential Scottish philosophers, and recenter to reflect the lived experiences of the students,” he says.

He became interested in the topic while working as a research assistant through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program for William Ewald, John J. O’Brien Chair of International Law at Penn Carey Law, on the life and intellectual history of Supreme Court Justice James Wilson, a Founder with connections to Penn who was educated in Scotland. “We don’t really think about Scotland as being an obvious place of influence” on the American founders when it clearly was, Ryu says.

Ryu says most work in this area has focused on correspondence between influential elites who either taught or studied in Scotland, such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Benjamin Rush, and Benjamin Franklin.

Prior scholarship, Ryu argues, has placed the American founders in a sort of silo, when they were actually in dialogue—on visits to Scotland and with new immigrants, carrying ideas to America. “A lot of people forget that they’re not just talking to themselves; they’re talking to people all over the world,” he says.

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, an associate professor in the School of Arts & Science’s Department of History, is Ryu’s Gelfman advisor and worked with him as a research assistant on a previous project. “He helped me do some real-world research and saw how I approached my work in the archives and how I put a together a historical story, and now it’s his turn,” she says. “He’s moving up the ladder and becoming an independent researcher in his own right.”