The chief interest of Boats Against the Current . . . lies . . . in its experimentation with a presentational structure that is faithful to the vision of a history without teleology but that does not lose its own bearings.
Lawrence Buell
Journal of American History
Boats against the Current, with its often subtle and original ... Read moreinsights, earns a high place in the grand tradition of American studies. In resurrecting and refashioning this genre for our times, Perry breathes renewed life into American intellectual history, for which undertaking scholars should be highly grateful.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of The Shaping of Southern Culture
William and Mary Quarterly
A remarkable book. Boats against the Current encompasses two overlapping periods in American history, addresses several deep and complex themes, and examines such diverse luminaries of the nineteenth century as Jackson, Emerson, Tocqueville, and Thoreau. Because of this panoramic scope, Perry's work should appeal to a broad audience.
Peter Field
Tennesse Historical Quarterly
Solid in its research, engaging in its tone, generous in its sympathies, vibrant in its yearning to communicate a spirit of curiosity about our antecedents—and to make them relevant.
Stephen J. Whitfield
New England Quarterly
Boats Against the Current must be placed alongside Vernon Parrington's The Romantic Revolution in America, R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam, and William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee as one of the most innovative general explorations of antebellum American culture. Indeed, reading Boats Against the Current is like peeling an onion and discovering in the process that the layers are the core—an experience which matches that of many of the antebellum Americans that Perry treats.
Lawrence J. Friedman
Reviews in American History
Perry has written an erudite, suggestive, and powerful book in the grand Tocquevillian tradition of American Studies. He has done for the road what Leo Marx did for the machine: taken a social fact and transformed it into a profound historical metaphor.
Charles Capper
American Historical Review
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