Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen - The Ideas That Made America (Book Review)

This little book is a delight for the student of American history.  The author covers the grand sweep of American ideas from the Puritans to Postmodernism and everything in-between.  It's like driving down the interstate glancing at one billboard after another.

What is the place called America?  Who are Americans?  No precise answers in this book, but some evidence to think about.

Intellectual history seems to be about ideas and how these ideas affected the course of the country's history.  Like every other aspect of our history, everything about it can be controversial.

I have never understood the Puritans and I still don't after reading the comments by this author.  They were something of a diverse group without unified beliefs.  Interesting, but complicated.  What remains of their influence if any on our country today?  P. 24

Homage is paid to Emerson's "The American Scholar" (1837) as a concise meditation on the American mind.  P. 64

Late 19th Century Victorian culture and its critics.  P. 90

Much about philosopher John Dewey.  P. 97

Much emphasis on pragmatism, Dewey, and James.  From James: truth is an idea that proves itself to be true  A notion of truth that is contingent, pluralist, and dynamic.  Truth can change over time.  Truths are plastic: never absolute, particular, not transcendent, immanent in the daily working of the world.  P. 106

Dewey's pragmatism he called instrumentalism.  I do not wish to rack my brain trying to understand it.  P. 107

Pragmatism developed from Darwinian thought.  P. 108

She overdoes it on Thomas Kuhn.  The author is a historian, not a scientist.  P. 158

The historian Christopher Lasch turned the word narcissism into a word describing the American personality.  The narcissist is not someone puffed up with their own self-worth.  Rather, the narcissist has a frail ego, choked with rage and self-loathing, and therefore turning to others for feelings of love and confirmation.  Narcissists have no concern for commitments to others or the common good.  They are totally into themselves only.  P. 164