Carl Lotus Becker (September 7, 1873 – April 10, 1945) was an American historian who studied the Age of Enlightenment in America and Europe. Life He was born in Waterloo, Iowa. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1893 as an undergraduate, and while there, he gradually gained an interest in studying history. Remaining for graduate work, Becker studied under Frederick Jackson Turner, who became his doctoral adviser there. Becker received his Ph.D. in 1907. Becker taught at Pennsylvania State College, Dartmouth, and Minnesota. He was Professor of History at the University of Kansas from 1902 to 1916. He then became John Wendell Anderson Professor of History in the Department of History at Cornell University from 1917 to 1941. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1923. Becker died in Ithaca, New York. Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House. Writing Carl Becker's 1915 The Beginnings of the American People is often cited for a description of "colonial merchants" as "sunshine patriots." The "sunshine patriot" only appeared once in this book, and that in a quotation from Thomas Paine's first American Crisis essay, which concluded a series of parallelisms that in turn presaged the introduction of General George Washington to the narrative. In this particular passage, Becker attempted to illustrate the "profound disillusionment" of the early years of the Revolutionary War, demonstrated by how "drudgery in obscure committee rooms was valued above declamation...the practical sense of Robert Morris counted for more than the finished oratory of Richard Henry Lee...when a febrile enthusiasm for liberty and the just rights of humanity seemed strangely transformed into the sordid spirit of the money-changer...[and finally] the times that tried men's souls, when 'the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot...shrinks from the service of his country, but he that stands...deserves the love of man and woman.' " The "sordid money-changer" was as guilty of an ebbing of revolutionary sentiments as "the sunshine patriot," but Becker did not explicitly define the latter as the former. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) Becker is best known for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University. According to Peter Gay in 1957: Its urbane and acidulous dissection of the philosophes has had great and lasting