[Hoeveler's] book is highly readable and well researched and will be a useful addition to most academic libraries.

Library Journal

An informative, erudite commentary on the role and significance of nine major colleges in Colonial North America. Hoeveler's marvelous narrative and intellectual depth reflect brilliant handling of the material. Highly recommended.

Choice Reviews

This is the first synthetic account that we have of the colonial colleges in the eighteenth century. Hoeveler shows that from their inception, institutions of higher learning in America were creatures of politics, and he demonstrates that religious commitments did not preclude significant contributions in British North America.

Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania

Creating the American Mind is an engaging 150-year journey across the institutional, intellectual, and political history of higher education in the American colonies. Adeptly situating each colonial college in its social context, J. David Hoeveler depicts unabashed academic politicization, intense religious strife, and conflicting regional interests. By combining biography with textual analysis, he demonstrates how patriotic fervor emerged from particularistic concerns, and how campus ferment spawned political and cultural revolution. Readers will enjoy Hoeveler's graceful writing, admire his breadth of knowledge, and appreciate his judicious conclusions.

Harold Wechsler, University of Rochester

This book is a must study for those interested in not only the basic history of the founding of the early colleges in colonial America, but in how the ideas cultivated at these colleges gave birth to, and nurtured, that often fractious but always purposeful American 'mind.'

History of Education Quarterly

Solidly and clearly researched. Its treatment of the nine colonial colleges is authoritative for the individual institutions and Hoeveler weaves the separate stories together quite nicely into a larger narrative.

Mark Noll, Wheaton College