This is the first in a three-lecture series entitled “Religious Freedom and the American Experiment,” sponsored by the Carroll College Constitutional Studies Center and the Apgar Foundation. The lecture is presented by Vickie B. Sullivan, a Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science who teaches and studies political thought and philosophy at Tufts University. An author of books on Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Montesquieu, she is an expert on the political thought of early modernity, its relationship to revealed religion, and the genesis of English republicanism. Her articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review, History of European Ideas, History of Political Thought, Political Theory, Polity, and Review of Politics. Her latest book, Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2017. This event is free and open to the public.