T. J. Jackson Lears (born 1947) is an American cultural and intellectual historian with interests in comparative religious history, literature and the visual arts, folklore and folk beliefs. Christopher Caldwell describes Lears' vision of American history in this manner: "In the great nineteenth-century narratives of the Rutgers historian T.J. Jackson Lears, the archetypal American personality is usually not a Civil War general or a cowboy or a railroad baron but a fast-talking salesman peddling Dr. Chase’s Nerve Pills or Kellogg Cereals or Dr. Warner’s Coraline Corsets."