"Cowie—like the best work of the mid-century historian Richard Hofstadter, whom he frequently cites—has written not so much a work of American history as a brilliant meditation about a central dilemma of American history….Even those readers more instinctively drawn to the greatest bard of American democratic possibility than to his dark and mordant contemporary, owe it to themselves to read the often unsettling, but always stimulating pages of The Great Exception."| Cowie