"They Are Footnoted as if They Were Twenty or More Years Younger"

"In disciplinary terms, the secret to these books' success is their position at the hinge of the history profession's adjustment to the new social history. Both Foner and Howe deftly wove together elements of the emerging paradigm with the strongest aspects of the old. More concretely, their books emulated the sweep and liveliness of the mid-century classics of American Studies, with its confidence in the representativeness of 'typical' or 'leading' men—even if neither book sought to circumscribe as large a subject as 'the American Mind,' both books burned with the same ambition to capture the 'Republican Mind' or the 'Whig Mind' in the round: as a political, intellectual, religious, and social phenomenon. This unspecialized or holistic approach was the most valuable legacy that Howe and Foner took from the old paradigm's leading practitioners (Hofstadter, Commager, Welter, et al.), because it set them apart from the more focused monographs of the intellectual historians, political historians, or social historians to come."

Andy Seal at U.S. Intellectual History Blog praises Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War and Daniel Walker Howe's The Political Culture of the American Whigs.