Intellectual renaissance in America

Idealism found its clearest expression in the men who immediately after the Civil War had inaugurated a new epoch in American history, the epoch of the intellectual renaissance in America. It was the epoch of the new movement in the direction of higher endeavor in all intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual activities of our national soul. Joseph Henry, Barnard, White, Draper, Eliot, Lowell and many other intellectual leaders led the movement, but it took its first concrete form in Baltimore, when Johns Hopkins University was formally opened fifty years ago.