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FROM THE HISTORY OF IDEAS TO IDEAS IN HISTORY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2012

LESLIE BUTLER
LESLIE BUTLER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Dartmouth College E-mail: leslie.butler@dartmouth.edu
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Extract

The story of American intellectual history's decline, fall, and phoenix-like rebirth in recent decades has become trite with the retelling: knocked from its position of prominence by the new social history and plunged into the chastened soul-searching of the famed Wingspread Conference of 1977, only to find itself rescued in part by the linguistic and cultural “turns” that swept the entire discipline of American history in the 1980s and 1990s. Like many a narrative, this one undoubtedly imposes too clear a pattern of meaning on a messier reality, but also like many a narrative, it has powerfully shaped the professional identities of American intellectual historians by giving them a sense of where they have been and how they arrived at their current place. That current place is a hospitable one, in many ways, for in the last couple of decades American historians seem to have grown increasingly receptive to the notion that ideas have mattered in history.

Type
Forum: The Present and Future of American Intellectual History
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 157 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Papers from the 1977 Wingspread Conference were published in Higham, John and Conkin, Paul, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979)Google Scholar. For overviews of the history of American intellectual history see May, Henry Farnham, The Divided Heart: Essays on Protestantism and the Enlightenment in America (New York, 1991), chap. 1Google Scholar; and Bender, Thomas, “Intellectual and Cultural History,” in Foner, Eric, ed., The New American History (Philadelphia, 1997)Google Scholar. John W. Burrow constructs a similar narrative for British intellectual history in “Intellectual History in English Academic Life: Reflections on a Revolution,” in Whatmore, Richard and Young, Brian, eds., Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History (New York, 2006), 8–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Post-structuralist theorists have called our attention to the unstable nature of texts for several decades now. I mean to imply nothing so epistemologically radical here. I am using the term as a synonym for a document in intellectual history and assume that the texts we read have authors (though in some cases they may be anonymous) whose intentions we can reasonably ascertain, and that they take material forms (though those forms may vary across both space and time).

3 See, for instance, Posnock, Ross, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar; Bay, Mia, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People 1830–1925 (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; and Holloway, Jonathan, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill, 2002)Google Scholar; Williams, Zachery R., In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970 (Columbia, 2009)Google Scholar. Holloway has also published, with Keppel, Ben, a primary-source reader Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the 20th Century (Notre Dame, IN, 2007)Google Scholar.

4 Capper, Charles, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: The Private Years (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar and idem, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: The Public Years (Oxford, 2007); Skemp, Sheila, First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female Independence (Philadelphia, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zagarri, Rosemarie, A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, IL, 1995)Google Scholar; DuBois, Ellen Carol and Smith, Richard Candida, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Feminist as Thinker (New York, 2007)Google Scholar. Beyond biography, there have been a spate of works that examine the mental worlds of women and explore the relevance of gender to intellectual life. See Kerber, Linda, Toward an Intellectual History of Women (Chapel Hill, 1997)Google Scholar; Kelley, Mary, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006)Google Scholar; Wayne, Tiffany K., Woman Thinking: Feminism and Transcendentalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Lanham, MD, 2005)Google Scholar; Winterer, Caroline, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, 2007)Google Scholar. See also the helpful review essay by Winterer, Caroline, “Is There an Intellectual History of Early American Women?” MIH 4/1 (April 2007), 173–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the British context see the impressive anthology edited by Taylor, Barbara and Knott, Sarah, Women, Gender, and Enlightenment (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; and the historiographic essay by Foxley, Rachel, “Gender and Intellectual History,” in Whatmore, Richard and Young, Brian, eds., Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History (New York, 2006), 189–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 On Asian American intellectual history see Yu, Henry, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Espiritu, Augusto Fauni, Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Stanford, 2005)Google Scholar. On Native American intellectual history see Konkle, Maureen, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill, 2004)Google Scholar; and Maddox, Lucy, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Ithaca, 2005)Google Scholar.

6 David Hall's contribution to the Wingspread Conference insisted on this broad spectrum, warning (for the seventeenth century at least) “against the presumption that ordinary people think in different ways, or possess a separate culture, from the modes of an ‘elite.’” Hall, David D., “The World of Print and Collective Mentality in Seventeenth Century New England,” reprinted in idem, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst, MA, 1996), 95Google Scholar.

7 Higham, John “From Boundlessness to Consolidation” and “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” both reprinted in idem, Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture (New Haven, 2001), chaps. 9 and 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, David Brion, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860: A Study in Social Values (Ithaca, 1957)Google Scholar.

8 Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1939)Google Scholar and idem, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA, 1953); Kuklick, Bruce, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven, 1977)Google Scholar.

9 Stanley, Amy Dru, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York, 1998), xiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Rose's, JonathanThe Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001)Google Scholar did something similar for British history.

11 Neil Harris, “Iconography and American Intellectual History: The Half-Tone Effect,” in Higham and Conkin, New Directions in American Intellectual History; Westbrook, Robert, “Fighting for the American Family: Private Interests and Political Obligation in World War II,” in Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson, eds., The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History (Chicago, 1993), 194–221Google Scholar; Winterer's quotation comes from her article “Venus on the Sofa,” MIH 2 (2005), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, Linda, “The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist,” Journal of American History 93 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 If I may be indulged an example from teaching undergraduates: as I wrote the first draft of this essay, I was teaching a research seminar on “Emerson's America.” For the independent projects, some students wrote about the response to Emerson's ideas and looked largely at newspapers and periodicals, some probed developments in Emerson's thought, tracking for instance the changing meaning of the Bible in his writing. All, however, depended on a fairly deep and sophisticated knowledge of Emerson and Transcendentalism to do their projects, and their projects all worked together to help our seminar better understand Emerson as well as the larger cognitive world of antebellum Americans.

13 “Fundamental, frequently used concepts like ‘context’—a term, in the end, for information somehow distilled from the same sorts of text that it is usually invoked to explicate—require far more formal analysis than they have had.” Grafton, Anthony, “The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950–2000 and Beyond,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006), 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the topic of context, especially the move from a concern with intertextual contexts to broader social and cultural contexts, see Brian Cowan, “Intellectual, Social, and Cultural History: Ideas in Context,” in Whatmore and Young, Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History, 171–88.

14 Historians have not been alone in their renewed attention to Pragmatism. For a helpful survey of the late twentieth-century revival, see Kloppenberg, James T., “James's Pragmatism and American Culture, 1907–2007,” in Stuhr, John J., ed., 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James's Revolutionary Philosophy (Bloomington, IN, 2010)Google Scholar.

15 Rodgers's, DanielAtlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar; Carson, John, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940 (Princeton, 2007)Google Scholar; Igo, Sarah E., The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kramer, Paul, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, 2006)Google Scholar; Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar; Engerman, David, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA, 2003)Google Scholar; Borgwardt, Elizabeth, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In British intellectual history see the work of Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; and idem, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (New York, 2006); or the essays collected in Turner, Frank M., Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (New York, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A very recent example, and one that challenges Borgwardt's interpretation of the 1940s as the crucial decade for international human rights, is Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar.

16 Gougeon's, LenVirtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens, GA, 1990)Google Scholar; Von Frank, Albert, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar. On the concept of the “public intellectual” see Jacoby's, RussellThe Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York, 1987)Google Scholar. But see also Thomas Bender's series of essays collected in Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore, 1993).

17 On hemispheric studies see two works on Alexander von Humboldt: Sachs, Aaron, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; and Walls, Laura Dassow, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago, 2009)Google Scholar.

18 On renewed interest in conservatism see Burns, Jennifer, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Angus Burgin, “The Return of Laissez-Faire” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University 2009). On American interest in Islam see Marr, Timothy, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Nance, Susan, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790–1935 (Chapel Hill, 2009)Google Scholar.