Even brief histories require extensive assistance to bring them into being. Support for this book came in many forms, from feedback at the early stages of its conceptualization to help with research tasks as well as comments and suggestions on various drafts of the manuscript. I am so grateful for the contributions of Laird Boswell, Zoë Rose Buonaiuto, Charlie Capper, Charles Cohen, Vaneesa Cook, George Cotkin, Bill Cronon, Richard Wightman Fox, Sam Gee, David Hollinger, Daniel Hummel, Sari Judge, Michael Kazin, Jim Kloppenberg, Bruce Kuklick, Susan Laufenberg, Isaac Lee, Leonora Neville, Kamila Orlova, Dean Robbins, Daniel Rodgers, Ulrich Rosenhagen, Dorothy Ross, Jennifer Stitt, Madelyn Sundquist, Kevin Walters, Robert Westbrook, and Caroline Winterer. I want to thank the generous and resourceful archivists and librarians who helped me turn research trails from cold to hot and dead ends into breakthroughs: Rebecca Jewett, Tony Lattis, Anita Mechler, Robin Rider, and Lisa Wettelson. I am especially indebted to Nancy Toff, who invited me to take on this project and offered me invaluable advice and encouragement along the way, and to Elizabeth Vaziri and Julia Turner for their roles in shepherding the manuscript through production. The generous support from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s William F. Vilas Trust and the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship Award provided me the time and resources necessary to complete the book.
To my loving family, Ulrich, Amelie, and Jonah, I say “thank you” again and again for tolerating a home choked with books and notepads, cold sandwiches for dinner, and a matriarch whose imagination too often drifted to remote places and people in American history while she was supposed to be watching them play little league (Jonah), relishing their theater performance (Amelie), or simply listening to them talk about their workday (Ulrich). I am so grateful that my mother, Miriam Ratner, was an English major back in the day when grammar was taught to students and that she was so willing to generously share her expertise as she read through all of her daughter’s drafts. I thank my wonderful students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who taught me whatever I know about communicating my passion for this material. And these acknowledgments would be sorely incomplete were I not to express my deepest gratitude to the extraordinary scholars in American intellectual history, whose imaginative, innovative, and meticulous research has informed my narrative here and whose books are listed in the further reading section. I would feel that this book did its job if it were read as an invitation to further explorations in these and other engaging works of American intellectual history.
This book is dedicated to the extraordinary historians Merle Curti and Paul Boyer, two of my intellectual history predecessors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I never met Merle Curti, but I am so fortunate to occupy the chair named for him and thus to have him as a source of daily inspiration in my writing and my teaching. For readers interested in a longer account of American intellectual history, I recommend starting with his majestic, Pulitzer Prize–winning Growth of American Thought (1944). I did, however, have the good fortune of meeting Paul Boyer, who welcomed me when I arrived at Madison in 2006 and graced me with his brilliant mind, deep humanity, and beautiful friendship. This book is dedicated to their memory.