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The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume
explores ways in which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites--from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals--in
which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred - some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures.The richness of
contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings
of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the
seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across
the Pacific to South Asia.
The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume
explores ways in which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites--from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals--in
which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred - some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures.The richness of
contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings
of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the
seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across
the Pacific to South Asia.
Introduction: Opening American Thought
James T. Kloppenberg
Part One: Frames
1. What was the American Enlightenment?
Caroline Winterer
2. The "Woman Question" in the Age of Mass Democracy: From Movement
History to Problem History
Leslie Butler
3. "We People of Color": Colored Cosmopolitanism and the Borders of
Race
Nico Slate
4. Curating the Black Atlantic
Jonathan Holloway
Part Two: Justice
5. The Sins of Slaves and the Slaves of Sin: Toward a History of
Moral Agency
Margaret Abruzzo
6. Nationalism and Cosmopolitan Humanity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
American Political Science
Duncan Kelly
7. The Political Origins of Global Justice
Samuel Moyn
Part Three: Philosophy
8. Unstiffening Theory: The Italian Magic Pragmatists and William
James
Francesca Bordogna
9. The Longing for Wisdom in Twentieth-Century US Thought
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
10. Pain, Analytical Philosophy, and American Intellectual
History
Joel Isaac
11. On Lying: Writing Philosophical History after the Enlightenment
and after Arendt
Sophia Rosenfeld
Part Four: Secularization
12. Science and Religion in Postwar America
Andrew Jewett
13. Religion within the Bounds of Democracy Alone: Habermas, Rawls,
and the Trans-Atlantic Debate over Public Reason
Peter Gordon
14. Christianity and Its American Fate: Where History Interrogates
Secularization Theory
David Hollinger
Part Five: Method
15. Paths in the Social History of Ideas
Daniel T. Rodgers
16. Toward a Free-Range Intellectual History
Sarah Igo
17. New Directions, Then and Now
Angus Burgin
Afterword
Michael O'Brien
Index
Joel Isaac is Associate Professor of Social Thought at University
of Chicago. His current research focuses on the relations between
politics and economics in twentieth-century British and American
thought.
James Kloppenberg is Charles Warren Professor of American History
at Harvard University, where he teaches European and American
intellectual history. He has written several books on transatlantic
politics and ideas from the 16th century to the present, including
Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and
American Thought.
Michael O'Brien taught American intellectual and cultural history
at the University of Cambridge. His research focused, in
particular, on the intellectual history of the American South.
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is Merle Curti Associate Professor of
History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research
focuses on 19th- and 20th-century US thought and culture in
transatlantic perspective.
"will help you think better about the history of thinking, both in
the United States itself and in a world still very much influenced,
for better or for worse, by the ideological -- and ideational --
formations of the American intellectual landscape." -- Michael J.
Kramer, Society for U.S. Intellectual History
"It will be a useful tool in advanced intellectual history classes
because it exposes readers to transnational perspectives on US
thought that extend beyond the North Atlantic world, where it is
too often cloistered....Highly recommended."--C. R. Versen,
CHOICE
"This wide-ranging anthology amply demonstrates the resurgent
vitality of American intellectual history as its practitioners push
their insights beyond national and disciplinary boundaries,
creating a discourse characterized by unprecedented capaciousness
and fluidity. What are especially exciting are the fresh forays
into the challenging regions of religion and philosophy. No serious
student of American thought, past or present, can afford to ignore
this
book."--Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of
Modern America, 1877-1920
"If you thought American intellectual history was provincial and
elitist, this eclectic collection demonstrates just how mistaken
you were. Covering topics as various, and as essential, as American
secularism, 'colored cosmopolitanism,' relations between John Rawls
and Jürgen Habermas, and 'wisdom' literature, leading experts in US
and European intellectual history here illustrate, as never before,
the wide-ranging richness of the field. These essays,
contributed by both veterans and rising stars, provide points of
reference and departure that will animate our work for the next
decade and beyond."--Suzanne Marchand, author of German Orientalism
in the Age of
Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (winner of the George Mosse
Prize of the American Historical Association)
"Written by some of the best younger scholars in American
intellectual history, with a few of the old guard in a supporting
role, these essays demonstrate how far the field has come since New
Directions in American Intellectual History (1979). They set an
enlarged and imaginative agenda for this and the coming generation
of scholars."--Dorothy Ross, Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor Emerita of
History, Johns Hopkins University
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