Carl Lotus Becker (September 7, 1873 - April 10, 1945) was an American historian. 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. Becker is best known for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University.