This article considers the origins, both scholarly and personal, of The American Renaissance 1876–1917 exhibition (1979) and the accompanying book catalogue, setting them in the context of architectural and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1970s. It traces how the exhibition came about, what it was trying to achieve and how it was received, both at the time and subsequently. It shows that the exhibition was not conceived as an attack on modernism as such or as a work of architectural conservatism. Rather, it was an attempt to rescue from obscurity an entire chapter of American architectural history that had been excluded by the modernising narratives of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Vincent Scully and others, and to reassess what this architecture might contribute to the present.