From the Digital Encyclopedia of European History: "'Civic humanism' describes a political culture and philosophy originating in Renaissance Italy in the 1400s but influential through the American War of Independence in the late 1700s and beyond. The term was originally developed in the first half of the twentieth century by the historian Hans Baron. Although publishing on civic humanism in earlier works, Baron codified this idea in his Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, published in 1955 and [revised] in 1966. For Baron, late medieval Italy was divided into two basic political groups: republics and tyrannies. Baron focused on the republic in Florence, Italy, and argued that late medieval Florentines idealized the contemplative life dedicated to study or prayer over the active life; prized Latin over the vernacular; and traced their origins and thus political subordination back to outside powers like the Roman emperor. All of this changed, Baron claimed, after a political crisis in 1402. He argued that in that year the armies of a Milanese tyrant threatened to conquer republican Florence, destroy its liberty, and subsume the city under a seigniorial yoke. The unexpected death of the tyrant saved Florence and, according to Baron, the city’s brush with tyranny brought about the introduction of a new outlook called civic humanism. Baron used the writings of humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Matteo Palmieri to show that the new civic humanist city was characterized by a preference for the active life dedicated to public affairs over the contemplative life; a willingness to accept the importance of vernacular writings alongside Latin ones; and most importantly a belief in the absolute importance of political liberty and the supremacy of republican political forms over monarchical ones. Baron implied that this civic humanism formed the core of Italian Renaissance culture and rescued western civilization from a pre-modern world terrorized by the tyranny of petty despots."