Few, if any, of his contemporaries matched Charles Austin Beard in his far-reaching impact upon twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural life. He was a major contributor to the reorientation of political science from formalistic description to realistic analysis, one of the progressive era's top experts on municipal government, an apostle of the gospel of efficiency, a pioneer in the establishment of public administration as a field of study, and a leading figure in the revamping of the nation's educational system to make the schools more relevant to current needs and problems. As a historian, he is most familiarly known for his path-breaking application of an economic interpretation to the American past. At the same time, he was the preeminent exponent-practitioner of a "New History" that aimed not simply at broadening the scope of historical study beyond politics to encompass the full range of human experience but at using...