New Review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home

I just got wind of Will Mackintosh’s very kind review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home in the Winter 2008 issue of the Journal of the Early American Republic.

Here are a few snippets from the review, which, at this point, seems to be available only in hard copy or via Project Muse.

…Fea is right about the potential utility of his book; it should be a wonderfully teachable volume in undergraduate classrooms…

…Fea takes the grand abstractions of the Enlightenment, conversion, patriotism, and republicanism and shrinks them to human scale, showing how they shaped the life of an individual whose name was never in revolutionary headlines. The real success of Fea’s book is in getting these two historiographies to speak to each other, by linking Fithian’s social experience to his mental world to show how they built the texture of his daily life