This roundtable reflects on the 25th anniversary of the publication of Daniel T. Rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard, 1998), a classic in our field.

The story of American intellectual history has a mythic quality: a slow beginning, a rise to great heights, and a precipitous fall. Early in the twentieth century, the study of American history and literature grew in American colleges and universities, after many years of teaching European ideas in lieu of an American canon. Then, from a literature department arose Vernon Louis Parrington and from an American studies department Perry Miller—their writing compelling, learned, and suggestive. Their books and their students established the new field of American intellectual history, drawing readers far and wide into their interpretations of how not just individuals but entire peoples had “minds” that hovered above society, transmitting ideas from the past and changing with the times. Miller pioneered this approach with The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, which became required reading for historians for decades—and ever since, for Puritan specialists. Miller used the published sermons of the most prominent theologians—and their European sources—to describe a crisis in Puritan thought over the character of their faith and therefore purpose. The concept of the regional or national mind became so popular that when Parrington's student Henry Steele Commager published The American Mind at mid-century, the book met a hungry public and went into eight printings in seven years.

When the World's Parliament of Religions convened at the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, it brought together delegates of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Islam, and several varieties of Christianity. Recent critics of the event have noted that the overwhelmingly Protestant organizers imposed their own culturally specific views of what constitutes religion on the non-Christian participants. But the guiding refrain of the Parliament—the unity of God and the brotherhood of man—reflects not only the specifically Social Gospel theology of the Protestant organizers but also a much wider consensus on the proper character, scope, and function of religion in a modernizing, globalizing, secularizing world. Buddhists from Japan, Hindus and Jains from India, and Buddhists from Ceylon actively participated in this international turn toward social religion as a way of pursuing their own culturally specific claims of distinct national identity, while Jews and Catholics in the United States equally adeptly claimed ownership of this central rhetoric of social religion in order to penetrate the American cultural mainstream.