Buckle and America

Thomas Henry Buckle often is dismissed for wrongly advocating a scientific history modelled on the physical sciences, but there was much more to Buckle than his theory of history as a science.  Writing about climate and food, he was a pioneer social historian who focused on ordinary people and the environment in which they lived.  He also was an innovative intellectual historian who argued that skepticism was necessary for progress.  Buckle’s fame in England came overnight and disappeared as quickly.  Any study of Buckle must explore his continuing popularity outside his homeland.  For several decades, he was read in Poland and Russia, in Japan and in Brazil.  Readers thought that Buckle provided a strategy for backward countries to become as prosperous as Buckle’s England. Much has been written about Buckle’s reception outside England but virtually nothing about how he was read in America which this article explores.