The ideas that made America A brief history

In this excellent work, Ratner-Rosenhagen, a University of Wisconsin historian, offers "a brief survey of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American intellectual history," with the aim of discerning what that history is, in terms of its context as well as its central ideas. In so doing, she takes a chronological approach, but also emphasizes the movement of ideas across boundaries of time and space, as well as between elite and popular cultures. An illustrative example is the theology of Martin Luther King Jr., who was a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, who in turn had been inspired by Henry David Thoreau, an adherent of medieval Buddhist philosophy. Beginning with the early modern European idea of translatio imperii ("translation of empire," an imagined line of succession connecting Alexander the Great to the U.S.), Ratner-Rosenhagen surveys America's intellectual history and influences upon it. She identifies as important such episodes as the attempts of post-Revolutionary Americans to develop a distinctive national culture; the often rancorous debates over the applicability of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories to policies toward African-Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and the poor; the emergence of the philosophy of pragmatism; the interwar struggle between modernism and tradition; and the culture shifts of the 1960s and '70s and the "culture wars" that followed. This is a thoughtful and succinct introduction to American intellectual history. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A historian delves into "some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American intellectual history."The term "intellectual," used to designate a professional thinker's "relationship to a broader public" was not coined until the turn of the 20th century, and then as an import from France. In this brief but academically dense survey, Ratner-Rosenhagen (History/Univ. of Wisconsin; American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, 2012, etc.) considers American intellectual history in the form of a survey of the broad, influential ideas that have held sway over the public mind and related institutions since America's inception, from the Puritans' highly literate sense of "moral mission and exceptionalism" to today's postmodern clash of identity politics. Of course, the early definitions of "American intellectual life" are problematic: The Native-Americans left very little record of how they "made sense of the arrival of Europeans," and then bloody warfare with them "drove their ways of understanding to fade from historical memory." Furthermore, early European arrivals "did not belong to America' but rather to their home countries and to their local companions in their tiny enclaves." The author emphasizes that the early colonists' embrace of religion ("moral sense") gave their views a distinct form from those of the European Enlightenment. However, enlightened early Americans retained crucial "blind spots"e.g., regarding the role of women and blacks. Ratner-Rosenhagen dashes through history, picking and choosing important protagonists and movements to illustrate particular striking currents. These include Thomas Paine's ignition of revolutionary republicanism; Noah Webster's use of his standardizing dictionary to shape a distinct American identity; Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transcendental movement's ability to forge an individualistic "vision befitting the experience of the new nation"; John Brown's abolitionism; and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The book assumes that readers possess a solid grounding in American history and epistemology.A valuable civic exercise that invites "thinking about thinking." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.