The Growth of American Thought

Merle Curti's survey follows the development of American ideas from the colonial period into the early twentieth century, moving across religion, science, education, and social reform rather than confining itself to any single field. Curti's organizing move was to adapt Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, developed to explain American political and social character, into a thesis about American thought itself: he argues that because the American environment differed so sharply from Europe's, Americans took the intellectual inheritance they carried across the Atlantic and reshaped it under frontier and market conditions Europe never faced. The book covers an enormous range of thinkers, famous and obscure alike, tracing how each generation's ideas answered the practical pressures of its own moment.

Where an intellectual historian like Perry Miller worked from the inside of ideas, treating theology and philosophy largely on their own terms, Curti insisted on reading thought as a social product, shaped from the bottom up by economic conditions, popular education, and the concerns of ordinary people rather than handed down from an isolated elite. He moves across religious revivals, the common school movement, scientific debate, and the reform crusades of successive generations, treating each as evidence of how ordinary conditions, not simply the arguments of a few famous thinkers, actually shaped what Americans came to believe. That method makes the book dense with specific names and movements rather than built around one sustained narrative argument, and it reads more like an ambitious reference survey than a page turning history. It suits a reader who wants American intellectual life connected concretely to the social conditions that produced it, across a genuinely wide historical span.