In recent years it has become customary to begin discussions about Milton in America by referring to Margaret Fuller’s assertion. When Margaret Fuller wrote in her review of Rufus W. Griswold’s two-volume edition of Milton's prose that “Milton is more emphatically American than any author who has lived in the United States,” she proved that interest in Milton in America was still very strong. While contemporary Milton critics still cite Fuller’s “wise observation,” they do not effectively analyze why anyone living in the 1840s would have come up with this conclusion. Her comment illustrates how reading is historically situated. She was not trying to be a seventeenth-century reader of Milton; as a “fit” reader of Milton, she understood her role was to make the past present, and to do this she “reinvented” Milton to plant his roots in the mid-nineteenth century. Milton Reinvented builds off of Fuller’s observation: it is a reception study that examines how different groups in nineteenth-century America read and responded to Milton’s texts. Milton’s presence in the debates of nineteenth-century social movements is what truly makes him American.