"Enlightening and shocking. The brilliant historian Kim Phillips-Fein delivers a necessary history of the scandalous but tenacious resistance to the emancipation Americans still need." -Samuel Moyn, Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and author of The Last Utopia

"An audacious argument that the American intellectual tradition is composed of not just egalitarian principles but also of many anti-democratic ones. With care and erudition, Country of Lords shows that the excesses of today’s far right intelligentsia are far from new." -Alissa Quart, author of Bootstrapped

"With an artful pen and a breezy style, Kim Phillips-Fein takes the reader on a revealing tour of the ideas and people inhabiting a dark and under-recognized continuity in American history: those committed to values that are too often seen as “un-American” but whose thought and power we ignore at our peril. An eye-opening read." -Jefferson Cowie, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Freedom's Dominion

"Both timely and necessary, this book describes the evolution and persistence of anti-Enlightenment apologias for political and material inequality that today, more than ever, threaten core American values, morals, and democracy itself." -David Nasaw, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Wounded Generation

"Powerful, expansive, and penetrating, Country of Lords confounds our assumptions about America’s political traditions and sensibilities. Reaching back to the world of the founders and far ahead to that of the tech titans, it demands a new type of reckoning." -Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America

"With energy and thoughtful scholarship, Kim Phillips-Fein, one of our most gifted historians, explains why every generation has had to fight to keep the egalitarian hopes at the foundations of our republic alive." -E. J. Dionne Jr., author of Why Americans Hate Politics

"Kim Philips-Fein has dug deep into US history and excavated a rogues gallery of men with bad, mad and even dangerous ideas. If you want to understand where we are today, this lively—and sobering—intellectual history will help." -Dr. Anya Schiffrin, editor of Media Capture in the Digital Age

"The Pulitzer finalist charts the long history of the American political conviction that all people are not created equal." -Publishers Weekly, "Spring 2026 Preview: History Top Ten"