Lee Edwards, PhD, is a leading historian of the conservative movement. He has written more than twenty-five books, including Goldwater; William F. Buckley Jr.: The Maker of a Movement; The Conservative Revolution; and A Brief History of the Cold War, as well as hundreds of essays and articles. Dr. Edwards is the Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation and an adjunct professor of politics at the Catholic University of America. He chairs the foundation that dedicated the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 2007. He has received distinguished awards from Hungary, Taiwan, Lithuania, and Estonia, as well as from the Ashbrook Center, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Fund for American Studies, Young America's Foundation, Accuracy in Media, and Grove City College. Dr. Edwards was also the founding director of the Institute of Political Journalism at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute was founded half a century ago to defend traditional liberal education in American colleges and universities against the onslaught of leftist ideologues. With its myriad of lectures, journals, fellowships, books, seminars, and mentoring programs, ISI is today the educational pillar of the conservative movement and the leading source of information about a free society for the many students and teachers who reject the post-modernist zeitgeist.

In this absorbing, fast-paced book, Lee Edwards, the pre-eminent historian of the conservative movement, details how ISI has inspired the minds of collegiate conservatives for decades and prepared them to defend the American and Western patrimony in public office, research organizations, the media, and the academy.