| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Carl J. Richard. The Battle for the American Mind: A Brief History of a Nation's Thought. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2004. Pp. xviii, 357. $27.95.
Carl J. Richard opens his book by anticipating three main lines of criticism. He admits that his work is neither historiographically driven nor glutted with scholarly footnotes. He acknowledges that only three of his nine chapters deal with the period after the Civil War. And he announces that his Christian faith allows for accuracy of facts while precluding pretense to full objectivity. The first two issues are highly problematic, with the second undermining the value of this work. The third presumed issue is not.	1
The author has a good thematic approach. He squirrels thinkers into the categories of theism, humanism, and skepticism. While each of these perspectives dominated a particular era, in modern times they have become a babel of possibilities, causing unresolved cultural friction in an "age of confusion." Richard provides good background on the Protestant Revolution, and he conveys well the complexities of Puritan life and thought. In drawing an intellectual pedigree for the Founding Fathers, Richard emphasizes, perhaps too strongly, the impact of classical thought, in contrast to his minimizing of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Yet, he indicates effectively how such admiration for Greek and Roman thinkers mingled with the varied relations of the founders to Christian belief. In a chapter on Romanticism, Richard pushes aside the influence of German transcendentalism and Asian philosophy on Ralph Waldo Emerson and company in favor of Platonism and Stoicism. The sections covering the period before the Civil War hum along with strong writing and effective themes.	. . .

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