More scholarly works on the history of American philosophy have been completed in Russian than in any other language outside of our own; yet most of that body of work has not been translated or studied comprehensively. Consequently, Soviet-era efforts to understand American thought have remained almost entirely unknown to Western scholars.

In his pioneering new book Interpreting America John Ryder makes available for the first time to English-speaking readers Russian views of the full range of American philosophical thought: from seventeenth-century Puritanism through the colonial and...