A Student of the American Character

The Rutgers professor T.J. Jackson Lears is one of the most original historians of our time—so original, in fact, that it is hard to say exactly what he is a historian of. American thought and culture are his subject. His period is Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Great War … that cascade of political battles that make up the two long generations between 1865 and 1932, when the United States was re-founded by moneymen on the broken promises of the Civil War. Lears edits Raritan, a prestigious literary/cultural quarterly. Year-in, year-out, for decades, he was a star reviewer in the book pages of the New Republic and the Wilson Quarterly. There his commanding and highly readable essays often dealt with canonical American writers and thinkers—Henry Adams, William James, Van Wyck Brooks.