Popular characterizations about intellectual-history texts involve a series of negatives: too dense, overly complex topics, needlessly long, no pictures, boring, and – worst of all – irrelevant. Those of us in the field disagree and have resisted these stereotypes for years. For us it's a labor of love. We are in it for the content, ideas, depth, and nuance. Despite the work, at times, the interests of the lay readers and intellectual historians seem incommensurable. As one of my family members is wont to say: to each their own.

With The Ideas That Made America, however, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen refuses to let the divide rest. This work adds another load of bricks to the bridge built in recent years between these seemingly incompatible worlds of reading, thinking, and perception. Ratner-Rosenhagen's writing is inviting and accessible. It draws you in and makes connections. I have seen this in her shorter works and witnessed it firsthand in conference presentations. I did not feel the reader connection as much in her most excellent book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2012). But The Ideas That Made America invites you into her fascination with US intellectual history. She wants you to “eavesdrop,” to listen in, on the great historical conversations between “interesting people” about ideas that have evolved during our nation's almost 250 years of existence (2).

Despite the book's confessed reliance on “more traditional sources of intellectual history (works of philosophy, political and social theory, literature, and cultural criticism),” Ratner-Rosenhagen's intellectuals are not just elites (3). She relays that we can also explore, and understand better, the “lived experiences” of people, in effect, by means of their ideas (116). By “thinking about thinking,” we will see that “thinking is where so much of the historical action is” (3). Taking a page from Ralph Ellison, Ratner-Rosenhagen underscores that people express ideas in the “lower frequencies” of culture and “live in an ideational realm” (5). In these passages she builds a bridge back to a historiographical point where social and cultural history presumably separated from intellectual history. The history of thought is for everyone, and should cover all historical actors – not just the privileged, literate elites.

Most survey texts, whether long or short, suffer from the lack of a strong, distinct thesis. Ratner-Rosenhagen's argument is clear. She relays that “this book tells the story of developments in American intellectual life as a history of ‘crossings’ in all of their varieties,” between cultures, “text and context,” the secular and sacred, and between “formal argument and emotional affirmation” (3). She outlines three important “types of intellectual transfer” across borders: national, temporal, and domestic cultural lines (4–5). Again, these movements are possible because people “live in an ideational realm” in varying contexts (“moral horizons”) of production, reception, competition, agreement, and translation (5, 77).

Structurally, The Ideas That Made America is straightforward and to-the-point. In the Introduction, Ratner-Rosenhagen presents us with her definition of intellectual history – what it is and what it does, and why it matters. She presents us with a recurring theme: the “mental and moral worlds of people from the past” (3). Chapter 1 covers the precontact-to-1740 period, and the next the transatlantic Enlightenment (1741–1800). Chapter 3 is on the 1800–1850 time frame, discussing the early republic and American Romantics. Chapters 4 through 6 march through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, American modernity, the Great Depression, and World War II. The last two full chapters (7 and 8) move from 1945 to the 1990s. The Epilogue covers 2000 to the present, focussing on globalization – but with no mention of the politics and policies of Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump, nor any coverage of terrorism or elective wars. 9/11 is not mentioned until the penultimate page of the main text (179).

To invoke a bit of jargon that the book avoids, the title implicitly presents a dialectic regarding the term “made.” There are ideas that came to, or were imposed upon, the lands that became known as “America” – especially the slice of the “New World” that became the United States of America. Beyond the new place names on maps that reflected structures of European thought, examples of ideas and ideals imposed include imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, slavery, racism, patriarchism, nationalism, republicanism, and democracy. Those imported ideas helped create the nation. And then there are those ideas or philosophies that reflect new contributions from thinkers in the US: radical individualism, eugenics, religious freedom, the aforementioned pragmatism. These are the ideas with which America has changed the world. The new and the old, however, live in conversation as overlapping paradigms. They are interactive, dialectically, as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis – making and remaking each other. Americans still debate which ideas should be dominant, reflected in the powers of its government and its institutions.

While anyone will profit by reading this book (including practicing intellectual historians), the entire presentation and tone beg an instructor to talk it through with undergraduates or advanced high-school students. To wit, Ratner-Rosenhagen notes, “With equal parts intrigue and skepticism, students often ask me: what is American intellectual history?” (1, original emphasis). The book is her answer, and it wants to be presented again as such. I took up that challenge in the fall term of 2019, teaching this to undergraduates at Loyola University Chicago. We read it in the context of a survey focussed on pluralism, science, health, and medicine. I felt that Ratner-Rosenhagen would help me with the first two, and students agreed. I loved her explanation of intellectual history and did not miss my shot to expand on her points for my class. For my special-survey course, I emphasized the chapters covering Darwinism (4), social Darwinism, pragmatism (5), eugenics (pages 120–21), and pluralism (significant parts of 5 through 8). Undergraduates appreciated the book's length, tone, readability, and ready applicability to the present.

My students offered no substantial complaints, but I wanted more on the ideas animating the Civil War and, more, in the 1950s and 1960s, on James Baldwin. For a book dedicated to young adults, navigating lives out from under parental and K-12 authorities, I do believe that Ratner-Rosenhagen could have talked more about identity early in the work – to set the stage for the youth culture of the 1960s and identity politics later. Also, given the chronological situation of most undergraduates’ lives, I do think some deeper engagement with post-9/11 America's global wars would work given the Epilogue's coverage of globalization.

Given the 2019 publication date of Ratner-Rosenhagen's book, one must wonder how the subsequent, earthshaking events of 2020–21 might change some of the book's emphases. What of #BlackLivesMatter, COVID-19, and the events of 6 January after the presidential election? Does Baldwin matter more in the wake of #BLM? Do questions about solidarity, the common good, and “we” matter more after the pandemic? Do questions about citizenship, voting, and democracy matter more after the Capitol insurrection? I think the answer to these questions is yes, and I believe that the topics foretell a second edition of the book with a few more pages added. I do not think that these additions, sprinkled throughout the text and perhaps in an Afterword, will ruin the “brief” in the book's subtitle. Students will appreciate the connections to the larger ideas and moral worlds contained in the present text.

Most survey books, whether long or short, present otherwise – as comprehensive, objective, and impartial. Those texts want you to feel safe, conveying sturdy accounts of the past. But no brief history of anything can avoid leaving out some parts of the story. The Ideas That Made America is, as such, necessarily a partial and subjective book. Ratner-Rosenhagen's philosophical approach (“epistemic humility”) allows for this kind of partiality (6). In her explicit sympathies with the thought of Richard Rorty, the author forthrightly acknowledges the pragmatism and anti-foundationalism behind her approach (176–77). She knows that all knowledge is contingent and a bit fuzzy around the edges – “linguistically mediated and culturally dependent. Period. Full stop” (177). It works because history is messy and complex. In the United States this is underscored by the fact that its intellectual history is dominated, as mentioned earlier, by a multitude of “crossings” and transfers (3). Hybridity is a prominent theme. Even so, this book presents a clear and compelling story. It provides concrete facts and attempts factual impartiality in relaying the downsides of certain ideas, thinkers, and trends of thought. The book is, lastly, more comprehensive than you might expect from any abbreviated survey of American thought.

The Ideas That Made America is a compact summation of the way that certain ideas and thinkers have impacted the course of US history. It can serve as a brief survey text for introducing the historical world of ideas to college and secondary students, as well as to adult learners. I cannot recommend this text highly enough.

In our current age of scholarship, historical synthesis is a daunting task. Bearing this in mind, Ratner-Rosenhagen's slim volume, just 232 pages, chronicling the history of American thought is a remarkable accomplishment. From Vernon Louis Parrington's three-volume Main Currents in American Thought (1927) to the subsequent groundbreaking syntheses of Perry Miller, Henry Steele Commager, and Merle Curti (whose chair at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Ratner-Rosenhagen currently holds), US intellectual history, in its earliest iterations, stressed the importance of narrative synthesis. In more recent years, the field has turned to more specialized studies, focussing on intellectual biography, ideological movements, and the popular reception of various thinkers and ideas. A synthesis of recent scholarship, however, has remained elusive. But no longer. Ratner-Rosenhagen's The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History is a fresh and timely contribution to the field.

Despite its expansive scope, from precontact to the present, Ratner-Rosenhagen's narrative is unified under the central theme of intellectual “crossings” (3). By crossings, she means the ways in which ideas have traversed national, temporal, and sociocultural borders throughout American history. This is a useful framing device for a synthesis of US intellectual history, allowing the author to weave together various thinkers, movements, and ideas into a colorful yet integrated tapestry. Like Curti's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Growth of American Thought (1943), Ratner-Rosenhagen places ideas within their historical contexts. Yet she also aims for a broader, more transnational, more transtemporal, narrative. As Ratner-Rosenhagen writes, “Intellectual history is invariably a history of other times and other places, because historical actors do not just think in their moment and in their tiny spot on planet Earth” (5). This is crucial and works to set The Ideas That Made America apart from earlier narratives of intellectual history.

Ratner-Rosenhagen's survey aims for ample coverage of American ideas and their multiple “crossings.” From indigenous cosmology, Puritan theology, and Enlightenment rationality to philosophical pragmatism, postwar liberalism, and the postmodernist vogue, she never loses sight of the central themes at the center of her narrative. The Ideas That Made America's strongest chapters, in this reviewer's opinion, are chapter 4, which carefully chronicles the crucial impact of Darwinian science on late Victorian intellectual life, and chapter 6, which explores the ideologically charged, if not too often forgotten, interwar period and the emergence of cultural multiplicity. Throughout her narrative, Ratner-Rosenhagen rightly notes the crucial importance of print culture as a powerful force in the dissemination of ideas across time and space, and between the various layers of American society. Furthermore, she stresses the influence of modern science in challenging older forms of thinking and creating periods of cultural and intellectual ambivalence.

The Ideas That Made America is a pleasure to read. Ratner-Rosenhagen writes with both clarity and precision, making her connections visible to readers. One particularly striking passage occurs at the beginning of chapter 5. The author uses the year 1859, which witnessed John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and the birth of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, as both a historical and temporal bridge, or “crossing,” from the fraught ambivalence of late nineteenth-century intellectual discourses to the encroaching modernist impulses of early twentieth-century social thought. “Having come of age in the intellectual world that the Civil War and Darwinian ideas forged,” she writes, “Dewey constructed a philosophy that would similarly challenge old ethical certainties, while emphasizing the individual's ability to effect positive change in an inscrutable cosmos” (97). This is a fascinating connection and clearly demonstrates the intellectual “crossings” Ratner-Rosenhagen emphasizes throughout her narrative.

That a historical synthesis is met with the oft-repeated critique of something being left out is perhaps inescapable. Authors are forced to make choices for the sake of appropriate coverage and narrative coherence. The absence of intellectual figures like Henry Adams, George Kennan, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis may irk some readers, but Ratner-Rosenhagen rightly opts for a representative treatment of crucial themes rather than a comprehensive survey of important thinkers. Despite any critique of selection, The Ideas That Made America is a phenomenal accomplishment and an essential contribution to the study of US intellectual history. It will no doubt appear on required-reading lists for undergraduate and graduate students alike, as well as on the bookshelves of general readers. With her unique gift for blending complexity and succinctness, Ratner-Rosenhagen has proven herself to be one of intellectual history's most eloquent voices.

The Ideas That Made America is a stunning synthesis of the mostly European and Euro-American ideas that puzzled and dominated mainstream American intellectual life between contact and the current age of globalization, what gifted intellectual historian Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen calls “a brief survey of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American intellectual history” (1). Ratner-Rosenhagen does not claim comprehensiveness. As one reads this analysis, one must remember both the scope and the limits of what the author is trying to do. At the same time, we might consider new directions for inquiry as we read. This is a synthesis of the most influential and often enduring ideas that shaped American institutions and ideals. Any intellectual history of America, she writes, begins in a “world of early modern empires.” And these imperial worlds “demonstrate that American intellectual life got its start as much within the minds of Europeans as in the external arena of fractious competing empires, each with its own history and uncertainty about its future along those jagged and shifting contact zones” (11–12). These competing empires might also include indigenous powerhouses like the Iroquois Confederacy. The author, however, suggests that, given the tens of millions of indigenous people who had inhabited the North American continent long before European exploration and settlement, to include them, “the story of American intellectual history might require a very different beginning.” She argues, instead, that the first century of indigenous–European warfare, disease, and loss of native lands precipitated the fading of indigenous intellectual ways from historical memory (10–11). The omission is one of historical silences, what some have called the violence of the archive. Ratner-Rosenhagen, thus, self-admittedly chooses the European beginnings of American intellectual history “for which there is much sturdier and more extensive documentation” (11). Is this adequate? Perhaps, but hopefully this will change as new work adds to our understanding of indigenous history and culture. We know already that indigenous perspectives have provided Euro-Americans with alternative ideas about the continent, resources, child rearing, gender, and the world around them in those “jagged and shifting contact zones.” Perhaps Ratner-Rosenhagen prudently omits an in-depth inclusion of the indigenous ideas into which these early modern empires came crashing, but future inquiry might consider what American intellectual history would look like with that “very different beginning.”

With a gift for connection and concision, the author deftly explores and explains the ideas that help us understand America (and helped Americans understand themselves) from the earliest (English) settler colonials through the 1990s – all in about two hundred pages. The text is relatively brief, but the work is masterful. The project is laid out in eight chronological chapters named for the ideas or the intellectual conflicts that helped define each era, and each chapter is organized into easily searchable subsections. The colonial world features empires, Puritan thought, and the first of the book's featured American attempts to build a moral community. The American Revolution is a manifestation of Enlightenment ideas, and the long revolution's architects chose republican thought to shape their version of the American experiment. It is early nineteenth-century Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, however, who articulate the first distinctly American vision for individual intellectual, spiritual, and physical liberation – a moral community of the mind and body. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the continued search to bring American reality in line with its founding ideas took a civil war and a constitutional amendment to end chattel slavery, but neither addressed the racism that slavery had helped shape. Darwinian science also complicated American certitudes, and, with John Dewey's Pragmatism, ushered in “a radically new intellectual temper” (97) by suggesting that truth was “contingent, perspectival, pluralist, and dynamic” (106). The author argues that, like Transcendentalism, Pragmatism remains one of the few distinctly American intellectual forms.

Darwinian agnostics and Pragmatists soon opened the door to the twentieth century with the hand of doubt. Early twentieth-century modernists of the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance spoke of alienation and uncertainty, and when World War II and the Cold War brought Americans face-to-face with the realities of totalitarianism and conformity, Ratner-Rosenhagen argues, new conversations about American values grew among liberals and conservatives alike. In her final chapter, the author explores the “opening of the American mind,” the hopeful explosion of “emancipatory ideas of all kinds” in the 1960s (152). This is an important chapter as the author reasserts her argument that ideas are crucial to action. Like the American Revolution, Ratner-Rosenhagen argues, the 1960s “started in ideas” (153). It is worth pausing here because America's two intellectual revolutions – the eighteenth century's Enlightenment revolution and the twentieth century's postmodern revolution – reveal the unbridged fault line in American intellectual history. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), argues the author, began the tectonic intellectual shift. Posing a question that foreshadowed an end to the Enlightenment's belief in scientific truth, he asked whether or not science is, in fact, the study of external reality mediated by social constructs. Kuhn thus paved the way for postmodernism's argument that reality is based in perception. At the close of the century, postmodern ideas ushered in an era of relativism, anti-universalism, and anti-essentialism.

In the end Ratner-Rosenhagen leaves her readers with an open-ended “Epilogue: Rethinking America in the Age of Globalization; or, the Conversation Continues.” This closing highlights the fact that defining an American identity has always been at the heart of the American experiment. From the Puritan's bounded moral universe to the porous postmodern debates about essence and perspective, Americans across time have engaged in the unique process of creating a community of belonging through ideas. As globalism has intensified nationalism in the twenty-first century, Ratner-Rosenhagen argues that Americans continue to seek and build a shared moral foundation. She highlights the idea of “intersubjectivity” in the work of Richard Rorty, an intellectual who, she asserts, is “arguably the most important and influential American philosopher of the second half of the [twentieth] century” (176). Rorty's ideas, she suggests, might provide a key to achieving the idea of an inclusive America (179).

Ratner-Rosenhagen's work presents us with an expert examination of the major elements of a predominantly Euro-American intellectual history. The difficulty with writing such a synthesis is determining which ideas merit inclusion, and which necessitate omission. And while the work might be criticized for too easily letting go of the challenge of integrating indigenous and African roots into American intellectual history, the project as a whole raises important points that bring those perspectives back into the conversation. I would, however, like to raise some further questions about the place of the Enlightenment and capitalism, in particular, in The Ideas That Made America. In a sense, my question is about conceptual organization. Are there ideas that have had staying power in America and thus have returned to center stage in most generations, if not every generation? As she suggests, ideas have a way of pushing out other ideas – even important ones. So which ideas have been so central to the American experiment that they have not been forced out of the conversation? I would argue that Enlightenment ideas of egalitarianism, the promise of inquiry and reason, and the centrality of law, as well as the lure of capitalism, not only deserve chronological attention, but also warrant returning roles as central players in ongoing conversations about America. Has postmodern argumentation pushed the Enlightenment's search for certitude and truth out of the nest? If one of the founding credos of the United States is a belief in natural law and natural rights, have those faded with postmodernism's fascination with anti-essentialism? (The author does mention a conference on this topic in the late twentieth century.) One might argue that a serious reckoning between America's founding Enlightenment ideals and contemporary postmodern argumentation needs to happen.

The Enlightenment gave the United States the republican ideas upon which the country based its first iteration. While the Ideas That Made America does explore republican thought, more could be said. Republican ideas shifted conversations about who could participate in politics and government (favoring property holders over bloodlines), they changed gendered ideas about female intellect and family, and they ordered the expectations about power both local and national. The Constitution, the debates between the federalists and the antifederalists, and the genesis of the Bill of Rights are all central ideas that made America, and postmodern anti-foundationalism has not been able to knock them from their pedestal. What of the shift from republicanism to democracy? These two concepts are not one and the same thing, and the shift to democracy in the early nineteenth century is a pivotal intellectual shift for many reasons. The rise of Andrew Jackson and his populist war on economic privilege, alongside his administration's active policy of indigenous dispossession, an idea that had been in the works since George Washington's first administration (and one that has undergirded the geographic, economic, and political expansion of the United States), shifted the relationship between ordinary citizens and their government and championed the first not entirely democratic blush of democracy in the United States.

The centrality of capitalism to the American experiment, one could argue, dates back even further than the Enlightenment. Republican citizenship, after all, was rooted in property. Capitalism shows up consistently in Ratner-Rosenhagen's work as thinkers addressed the concept as a force, but it might also be worth thinking about capitalism as an idea in itself and not only as a force to be reckoned with. How did Americans talk about capitalism? How did capitalism shape the gendered nature of work as Jeanne Boydston and others have discussed? How did slavery as an institution both drive capitalist impulses and grow because of them, as Eric Williams, Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist and others have explored? How did capitalism inform discussions about class, the right to strike, and government entitlement programs? And how have the environment and natural resources been affected by capitalist ideas about use and exploitation?

Ideas are powerful things. America, as Ratner-Rosenhagen points out, began as an idea and as a point of conflict over how that idea would unfold. The history of the region, and of the nation born from it in 1776, includes rich and diverse conversations about the possibilities and failures of this idea. The America of Ratner-Rosenhagen's book was the sixteenth-century idea of Europeans bent on empire (and the reality of those who already lived here), but in its ongoing struggle to create a moral community, America has perpetually widened (and at times narrowed) the boundaries of that community. In its long struggle for (and sometimes against) pluralistic tolerance and inclusivity, as Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen asks in her closing, is the cause of America, thus, “the cause of all mankind” (179)?

Intellectual history provides ample evidence that readers’ interpretations of a text play a considerable role in determining how its claims, ideas, and arguments go on to make their way in the world. Published scholars may recoil from the notion that the “death of the author” means that their intentions and intellectual aspirations are irrelevant to the text. They are not. But readers, no doubt, have a vital say in determining what a text says, what it could have said, should have said, and what might have been better left unsaid.

Having spent a good portion of my scholarly life examining the reception of texts, I am grateful that the editors of the Journal of American Studies enlisted such thoughtful and discerning readers of The Ideas That Made America. When Kristen Foster observes that the study seeks to examine the “process of creating a community of belonging through ideas”; when Adam Stauffer lifts up the book's theme of “crossings,” noting that it seeks a “transnational … transtemporal” focus; and when Tim Lacy describes intellectual history as “a labor of love” and appreciates my effort to get readers to share our affection, I feel that a minor miracle has occurred: my intentions harmonized with their reception. At the same time, these readers help draw out the book's inevitable silences or gaps, posing important questions that point the way to further inquiry and discussion. For that I am also grateful.

Here a confession is in order. The Ideas That Made America would have never come into being had I not been so delusional about what a book of this scope would require. My editor at Oxford University Press had approached me about writing a new history of American intellectual life and enticed me with the promise that it could be, indeed should be, brief. It had been several decades since any historian had either the nerve or the insanity to try to synthesize the latest scholarship on American intellectual history, and to try to do so in a way that would be engaging for the general reader. Over the years there has been exciting new research on the intellectual exchanges between Native Americans and European settlers; the Enlightenment and Romanticism; and the clash of political, economic, and religious ideologies during the “long nineteenth century” and the “American Century,” but no effort to integrate them into a broader narrative about American history. But here was the catch: given the frenetic busyness of twenty-first-century lives, even readers who are intellectually ambitious now prefer more concise syntheses to the once sweeping surveys presented in the form of (literally) weighty tomes that could double as doorstops. Indeed, I had long hoped that a historian would write such a book – one that I could as easily share with reporters who asked for help in understanding the backstory of a recent intellectual controversy, or with general readers and students who were curious about an ideas-focussed approach to the American past. And so my editor got me to wonder, perhaps in a moment of unchecked hubris: could I be that historian I was waiting for? What got me to answer “yes” was not my ego but rather my naivety: I dreamed that the constraints of concision would be liberating.

I will spare you the gory details of what is involved in distilling five hundred years of American thought into a brief history. But let's just say that it isn't pretty. It involves quite a bit of teeth gnashing and anguished pleas to the Universe to help with hard decisions about what to leave on the page and what to relocate to the cutting room floor. These decisions were made all the more difficult given the importance of showing the diverse range of thinkers, noncanonical ideas, and surprising intellectual forms that played significant roles in the American past. As the roundtable contributors have noted, true appreciation of the ideas that made America requires that we widen our horizon of attention to include the transnational forces at work, and to tune our ears to hear subtle harmonies in assumptions between clashing thinkers (or striking dissonances between those who believe they are working in concert with each other). A true appreciation of the ideas that made America also requires that we see how some of the most powerful ideas in American history have expressed themselves in forms other than rational arguments and through media other than printed texts. And it requires attention to the ways in which radical claims become naturalized into conventional ones, smooth consensual notions fracture into jagged-edged fragments, and abstractions become lived experiences. Those are some rather weighty but necessary demands on such a slim volume, and they were the demands I kept front and center while writing it.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that “the will cannot will backwards,” but in reflecting on the faintness or outright absence of crucial historical themes and thinkers from the book, I wish this weren't so. Foster wonders what the book might have looked like had it done more to integrate, among other things, the “indigenous and African roots into American intellectual history,” “the centrality of law … as well as the lure of capitalism,” and the “shift from republicanism to democracy.” Stauffer rightly observes that the absence of certain thinkers (including “Henry Adams, George Kennan, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis”) “may irk some readers.” Lacy may be one of those readers irked by the absence of Baldwin, and given Baldwin's formidable presence in twentieth-century American thought, plus his resurgent popularity today, there is simply no good response to account for his absence. It might reassure readers to know that these themes and figures did enjoy prominence of place in longer drafts of the manuscript, but that might also rightly activate their outrage that these were the themes and thinkers that didn't survive the cuts. The “space-constraints-made-me-do-it” excuse is both an undeniable fact of a short synthesis such as this and a wholly unsatisfying, even slightly annoying, one.

I do, however, have what I imagine will be a more interesting, if also provocative, response to Lacy's curiosity what the book might have looked like had it not ended with figures and events from the late twentieth century, but had carried on to cover 9/11, “#BlackLivesMatter, COVID-19, and the events of 6 January after the presidential election.” To this I might add the 2008 financial crisis and its disastrous radiating effects, the invention of iPhone and Twitter, the election of America's first African American President, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the rise in discussions about transgenderism, and Donald Trump. Where to begin a historical narrative – in this case with the first time “America” makes its appearance in published form in 1507 – is a much easier call than where to end it. We all know that the end of a historical narrative in no way means the end of the history it analyzes. But endings are also inflection points, so where a book ends can be the point that's most inflected. But endings can also be deceiving, because they can suggest to the reader that the event or figure or development they focus on is what everything in the preceeding pages was driving towards, as if by nature and necessity. What makes the study of history so fascinating, so worthy of our sustained attention and analysis, and so intellectually and even morally demanding is that it is rife with contingency, accident, and both welcome and horrifying surprises. To say that America's long history of racism, know-nothing nativism, the fetishization of wealth, and the strange marriage of the exaltation of freedom and the attraction to authoritarianism provides historical context for the rise of Donald Trump in no way means that Donald Trump is what this history was leading up to. To my mind, the most histories that seek to come up to the hazy temporal territory we call “the present” can hope for is to help its readers think of their moment as part of a “long now.”

In the end, I hope it matters less that this book was born of a delusion than that it was born out of an earnest longing to share the rewards of thinking about American history by way of the thinking that shaped its course. This is the longing that informs my classroom teaching (and clearly that of the contributors) to present history not as a simple unidirectional progression of events, but rather as a complex symphonic conversation among people from the past who tried to make sense of themselves, each other, their America, and their world.

What I have learned over the years doing this labor of love, and what I hope to show in the book, is what entering this conversation can mean for us today. The history of thought can rescue us from the ahistorical and intellectually impoverished notion that the moral, political, economic, and even existential problems we are facing are new to our own time. Rather, we can see how historical thinkers time and again addressed many of the issues that vex us today, and we can begin to understand our moral worlds not as some radical break from the past but rather as part of an ongoing debate. At the very least what intellectual history can offer in fractious, uncertain historical moments like ours is that we can keep company with thinkers from the past, who might give us a language to better articulate the conditions of our long now, and to consider solutions we never imagined or dreamed were possible.