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.)