Acquire New Directions In American Intellectual History Translated By John Higham Contained In Version

the 'coming of age' of social history in thes, intellectual historians had taken the lead in thethcentury study of the American past.


This volume reflects the recent resurgence of interest in intellectual history, It exemplifies the concerns of a new generation of intellectual historians and highlights the various directions probed by their scholarship.
Taken in its entirety, the book is the broadest and most sophisticated examination of a historical specialty yet published.


The book contains theoretical perspectives on the field and scholarly evaluations of major themes in American intellectual history.
John Higham's introduction evaluates the changes and problems in the discipline, including its part in the development of other fields of inquiry.


Laurence Veysey, Gordon S, Wood, and David A, Hollinger each take up the question of intellectual history's importance and its relationship to other disciplines, particularly social history and the social sciences.


Several historians explore the role of beliefs and values in American history, Rush Welter defends a continuing effort to identify an 'American mind', Sacvan Bercovitch offers a perceptive new reading of Perry Miller's influential essay, "Errand into the Wilderness, " Henry F. May reflects on the similarities and dissimilarities between religious and intellectual history,

Dorothy Ross takes a new look at two broad interpretations of American political thought the 'liberalism' of Louis

Hartz and the 'Republicanism' of J.
G. A. Pocock. Thomas L. Haskell writes about the deterministic implications of recent approaches to intellectual history,

Other contributors relate beliefs to the larger culture, Murray G. Murphey proposes an anthropological understanding of belief and culture and stresses the hazards of broad generalizations in intellectual history.
David D. Hall, by analyzing the impact of printing upon popular thought, suggest ways that historians can relate the beliefs of intellectual elites to those of the masses.


Thomas Bender focuses on the interaction between the city and the professions, Neil Harris shows how photography has changed the way American society 'sees' and relates to an environment.
And Warren I. Susman analyzes modern psychology's understanding of human personality in shaping the development of the larger society,

Paul K, Conkin's afterword summarizes the current state of the field, highlighting the many continuities with the discipline's past, Required reading for students of American intellectual, cultural, and arguably social history, This set of essays, published in, derives from the "Wingspread Conference" in Racine, Wisconsin, in late, The contributors came together to discuss the state and future of the field of American intellectual history, For the most part, these essays are still highly relevant today,

At the heart of this book is a disciplinary catchcreated by the dominance of social history.
On the one hand, social historians have pointed out that a lot of earlier intellectual history of the "New England mind" sort relied on unrepresentative evidence.
Intellectualists at midcentury were guilty of studying elites and treating them as if their ideas obtained among everyone else in society.
Careful intellectual historians the contributors generally concede need to restrict their claims to the population segments represented in their evidence.
Yet on the other hand, the dominance of social history also means that intellectualists now have to make claims about the population at large.
The scholarly public demands that our history reveal the experiences and agency of the inarticulate masses, So what's an intellectual historian to do, given the apparent fact that he or she, by definition, studies the articulate

The first part of the collection, "Definitions," contains the most direct solutions to this problem.
The solutions presented, however, are not entirely consistent with each other, First, Laurence Veysey argues that we must embrace rigor we must be modest, making claims that are only as broad as our evidence can support, even if this means we no longer produce the majestic syntheses that made the reputations of people like Miller and Hofstadter.
Next, Gordon Wood argues that the business of intellectual history is to study the construction of reality, This allows us to skirt a tricky professional debate, We need not assume that ideas are the primary causes of behavior instead, we can simply take them as the manifestation of the meaning of behavior.
Cognitive life, whatever else it may be, is the way people make sense of life in general, and thus is worth studying.
Next, David Hollinger argues that we should study intellectual life as a social phenomenon, not studying autonomous ideas or even traditions but rather studying specific discourse communities.
In practice, he suggests, this means looking at the questions that people have in common, A community of intellectuals may not have the same answers and should not be assumed to think alike, but they will share a common set of questions.
Finally, Rush Welter argues a contrarian position, He argues that we must try to study large patterns of thought in particular, the "national mind" of a given era in order to put particular thoughts in context.
Without some sense of the larger setting, we can't properly understand any given person or group, This does not, however, require us to pretend that everyone at a given time thought alike, Instead, it leads us to study overlapping ranges of patterns of thought, which defined the intellectual resources and risks that presented themselves to a given thinker.


The rest of the book comprises more concrete essays on different aspects of American thought and culture, from the colonial period to the present day.
Many of these essays, however, also address the socialhistory challenge, Henry May, for example, argues that American intellectual history should exist in a dialectic with religious history the latter often provides insight into popular attitudes, and especially into ideals, symbols, and emotions.
Intellectual history informed by religious history thus promises to reveal American culture as a "richer and more various" milieu that is not limited to the production of an articulate elite.
In another essay, Murray Murphey argues that modern American culture is fundamentally different from premodern culture, Thanks to the specialization, professionalization, and institutionalization of inquiry, he claims, modern American thought does not amount to a coherent worldview to study instead, intellectual historians must study isolated institutions and disciplines.
And in a related article dealing with the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century, Thomas Bender argues that we should study intellectual life in its local social context.
Like Murphey, Bender sees professionalization as having a corrosive effect on the civic sharing of American thought, He also argues, however, that we should be studying the cities and institutions within which the intellect has been exercised.
In other words, he advocates the "social history of ideas" as a way to reconcile social and intellectual history.
I heartily approve.

Besides the articles I have mentioned, several of these essays may be important for understanding specific topics in American intellectual history.


I'd like to note that the sitelinksecond annual US Intellectual History Conference, which will be held this November in New York, will feature a panel retrospective on the Wingspread Conference.
Several of the original participants have agreed to appear, John William HighamOctoberJulywas an American historian, scholar of American culture and specialist on issues of ethnicity.
Born in Jamaica, Queens, Higham earned his undergraduate history degree from Johns Hopkins inand received a masters degree from Yale University in.
In World War II, he served with the historical division of the Army Air Corps in Italy, He married psychologist Eileen Moss Higham in, After serving as assistant editor of The American Mercury, he earned a doctorate at the University of WisconsinMadison in.
He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, Rutgers University, Columbia University and the University of Michigan before returning to Johns Hopkins in.
He is n John William HighamOctoberJulywas an American historian, scholar of American culture and specialist on issues of ethnicity.
Born in Jamaica, Queens, Higham earned his undergraduate history degree from Johns Hopkins inand received a master's degree from Yale University in.
In World War II, he served with the historical division of the Army Air Corps in Italy, He married psychologist Eileen Moss Higham in, After serving as assistant editor of The American Mercury, he earned a doctorate at the University of WisconsinMadison in.
He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, Rutgers University, Columbia University and the University of Michigan before returning to Johns Hopkins in.
He is noted for having described anti Catholicism in the United States as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history".
Higham died of a cerebral aneurysm in Balti, sitelink.