In this full-scale critical biography of Horace Mann, Jonathan Messerli has provided the first comprehensive portrait of the humanitarian reformer who helped lay the basis for the American public school system. Looking behind the father-of-the-system legend, Jonathan Messerli shows us the man himself in the context of his era, with its tensions and fears for the future of society. Mann's legal and political careers involved him in virtually every reform movement of his time -- a period when the poor, the intemperate, the enslaved, the illiterate, the imprisoned, the insane were seen by reformers not merely as objects of pity and benevolence, but as distressing challenges to the growing optimism of "the American way of life." Mr. Messerli shows Horace Mann on a one-man crusade to modify human nature through moral indoctrination of the young and systematic training in literacy and citizenship. Writing voluminously, lecturing across the country, Mann worked tirelessly to establish a public-based system of education that he would, he hoped, usher in a millennium of enlightened ethics, patriotism, brotherhood, and affluence. -- From publisher's description.