Since the heyday of an insurgent social history, now over two decades ago, intellectual historians have scrambled to keep the history of ideas relevant to the history of social change. Attesting to their success are the new cultural historians who explore the relationship between mass behavior and popular thought, especially where the two most obviously intersected, in reading, writing, and publishing. Studies by Richard D. Brown, David D. Hall, and Jane Tompkins, to name but a few, have given special attention to popular books, newspapers, and the circulation of information. The two volumes reviewed here join this important and exciting body of scholarship. However, like so many studies of popular culture, Pillars of Salt and A Fictive People betray the predilections of their authors for either intellectual history or social history. The joining of the two approaches to the past, in other words, remains incomplete. Daniel A. Cohen approaches early American culture from the perspective of intellectual history, attempting to trace popular perceptions of criminal behavior presented in several succeeding genres of crime literature. Nevertheless, he does not ignore social behavior and context, especially where he uncovers the role of ministers, lawyers, publishers, even criminals themselves, in creating popular texts. Moreover, he situates the evolution of crime literature within the Puritan-to-Yankee transformation of New England society. Sixteenth-century European crime literature told of prisoners' passing from doubt to conviction to assurance of grace. New England ministers added