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Daniel J. McInerney’s The Fortunate Heirs of Freedom: Abolition and Republican Thought, apart from its specific contributions to the field, more generally shows the continuity between features of American culture that we tend to think of as distinct from, even at odds with, one another: eighteenth-century diagnoses of power, reverence toward the Revolution, denunciations of self-indulgence, the developing American political tradition, the evangelical commitment to reform, the faith in a free labor economy, the fear of personal and institutional corruption, and the anti-slavery movement. In this way, it not only makes an enormous contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century U.S. culture but illustrates for all scholars how any study of the period must take into account the distinctive way American discourse blended together various principles and beliefs.