Born in America, the American Left was nurtured by intellectuals and activists who read Jefferson and Whitman before they read Marx or Mao. One lesson this brilliant history teaches us is that the fury of radical innocence and wounded idealism so peculiar to American intellectual history springs from native soil. Nor is the American Left a single phenomenon but four surprising eruptions throughout the past century:Informative and useful. . . . A balanced history of leftist American politics in the 20th century. . . . Admirably nonpartisan. Jonathan Yardley,