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  • The American Scholar

    Freedom of Thought

    Mar 04, 2019 4 minutes
    Review by John Kaag

    THE IDEAS THAT MADE AMERICA: A Brief History

    BY JENNIFER RATNER-ROSENHAGEN

    Oxford University Press, 220 pp., $18.95

    REAL PRESIDENTS READ BOOKS. When the Library of Congress was destroyed in the War of 1812, the former president Thomas Jefferson offered his collection to replace it, commenting that “I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from this collection … there is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.” Congress agreed, purchasing the bulk of Jefferson’s library, 6,487 books, for $23,950. That this interaction between Congress and a president—this cooperation based in a common love of knowledge—is completely

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