The leader of the idealist movement in American philosophy, William Torrey Harris exercised great influence over social and intellectual life in the United States during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Members of this movement were the first to translate and interpret the works of German thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte; they were also the first to establish a periodical devoted exclusively to philosophy, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Harris and the majority of his followers were professional educators who believed in the applicability of philosophy to education and other practical matters; therefore, much of what they found most useful in German thought had to do with pedagogical theories and practices, many of which they imported to the United States. As superintendent from 1868 until 1880, Harris made the St. Louis, Missouri, public schools a model school...