When Parrington's Pulitzer Prize-winning history of American ideas was first published, Henry Seidel Canby wrote, "This is a work of the first importance, lucid, comprehensive, accurate as sound scholarship should be, and also challenging, original in its thinking, shrewd, and sometimes brilliant." Alfred Kazin has called Main Currents in American Thought "the most ambitious single effort of the Progressive mind to understand itself."
Three Volumes in One Book - Volume I, The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800, treats such influential figures as John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Samuel Sewall, Increase and Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Tom Paine, and Thomas Jefferson.
In Volume II, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800 - 1860, Parrington treats such influential figures as John Marshall, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Volume 3 - The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920