From the mid-1890s until World War I, James Ford Rhodes dominated Americans' understanding of their recent past to a degree unmatched by any historian before or since. Unlike most historians, whose work deals with other times or other places, Rhodes wrote a massive history of his own country during his own lifetime--the last half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. Hundreds of thousands of Rhodes's readers had participated in the events he narrated and came to look upon him as the scholar who gave meaning to the experiences of their lives.

Because Rhodes mirrored so well his own class and time, he will always be an important figure in American social and intellectual history. Because he stands as a transitional writer between the great literary historians and gentlemen scholars of the nineteenth century and the professional historians of the twentieth, and because...