permissions quiz

Hello everyone: As you may remember from 'dumb guy number 1', I saved my old /home/mike directory on a separate HD and was able to recover all of my working files. That's the good news. The bad news is that they all are now listed as ROOT everything (user, group). I know there's commands to change individual files, etc. (chmod, chown), but is there a way I can change the permissions of a directory and all of its contents without doing each file individually? Any ideas greatly appreciated. Otherwise I'll be here until Thanksgiving :-\ Cheers, Mike