1. White on Lears: Richard White recently reviewed Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America,1877-1920 for The Nation's upcoming Nov. 2, 2009 issue. It's a long review and I'm still absorbing both it and the message of Professor Lears's book. But I nevertheless recommend it because of Lears's motion to reset the paradigm from Robert Wiebe's search-for-order view of the era.
2. "Politics and Letters": This is the name of James Livingston's weblog. Professor Livingston will be giving the plenary at the Second Annual USIH Conference next month in NYC. The title of his paper is: "Seeing, Hearing, and Writing the End of Modernity: From Reading Pragmatism to Watching Movies."
3. Praise for Liberal Arts Colleges---From An Unusual Source: Three Chinese students reflect on the value of American-style liberal arts colleges in a book dedicated to Chinese audiences. I wonder about the relative and absolute numbers of first and second-generation Chinese that have attended liberal arts colleges since, say, the 1960s? The interview in the linked InsideHigherEd article contains culturally-specific insights about, as well as validation of, the value of a liberal arts education. Broadly speaking, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of medium and long-term changes might result in China if a critical mass of the Chinese increased attendance in these kinds of schools? And if change came about, would it feel like old-school cultural diplomacy (slow change from the outside in), or a new, twenty-first century Chinese cultural revolution (inside-out change)?
4. Adjuncting in Chicago: Even though I was surprised by the lack of history adjuncts in this Chronicle of Higher Education forum, as well as disappointed in the somewhat misleading title, the forum looks to me like a reasonable representation of part-time college-level instruction in Chicago.
5. HASTAC: My Chicago colleague Michael Kramer alerted me to a new player in digital academia/scholarship called HASTAC. It's short for Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. In other words, it's an interdisciplinary endeavor. Here's their about page and a recent forum on the notion of democratizing knowledge.
6. The Misuse of Good Ideas: I wonder if a new category of anti-intellectualism should involve the intentional misuse of good ideas. A prominent example I have in mind derives from, but is not centered on, Gerald Graff's injunction to "teach the controversy" (but Graff is not the object of my concern here). For the unfamiliar, he delivered this idea in his 1992 book, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W.W. Norton). The notion was expanded upon in an essay collection edited by William E. Cain, titled Teaching the Conflicts: Gerald Graff, Curricular Reform, and the Culture Wars (New York: Garland, 1994).
I have just learned, however, that Graff's idea was picked by Intelligent Design proponents as a means to wedge curricular debates in the evolution versus creationism drama. This Wikipedia entry, if it can be trusted, lays out the situation. The entry notes that Graff is perhaps chagrined at the misuse of his idea.
7. "Integrating the Life of the Mind" at the University of Chicago: This is a new web exhibit hosted and constructed by the University of Chicago's Special Collection Research Center in conjunction with Institute for Advanced Study professor, and former University of Chicago dean, Danielle Allen. I see the exhibit as a kind of partial rough draft of the history of African-American intellectuals in Chicago.
8. Salon Writer Probes the Mind of Glenn Beck: Alexander Zaitchik traces Beck's intellectual roots to Willard Cleon Skousen (1913-2006).
9. Educating Intellectuals: It looks like Walt Disney's Baby Einstein videos are not helping fight anti-intellectualism in America. I guess we'll have to concentrate again on K-16 education.
Senin, 26 Oktober 2009
Tim's Light Reading (10/26/2009)
1. White on Lears: Richard White recently reviewed Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America,1877-1920 for The Nation's upcoming Nov. 2, 2009 issue. It's a long review and I'm still absorbing both it and the message of Professor Lears's book. But I nevertheless recommend it because of Lears's motion to reset the paradigm from Robert Wiebe's search-for-order view of the era.
2. "Politics and Letters": This is the name of James Livingston's weblog. Professor Livingston will be giving the plenary at the Second Annual USIH Conference next month in NYC. The title of his paper is: "Seeing, Hearing, and Writing the End of Modernity: From Reading Pragmatism to Watching Movies."
3. Praise for Liberal Arts Colleges---From An Unusual Source: Three Chinese students reflect on the value of American-style liberal arts colleges in a book dedicated to Chinese audiences. I wonder about the relative and absolute numbers of first and second-generation Chinese that have attended liberal arts colleges since, say, the 1960s? The interview in the linked InsideHigherEd article contains culturally-specific insights about, as well as validation of, the value of a liberal arts education. Broadly speaking, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of medium and long-term changes might result in China if a critical mass of the Chinese increased attendance in these kinds of schools? And if change came about, would it feel like old-school cultural diplomacy (slow change from the outside in), or a new, twenty-first century Chinese cultural revolution (inside-out change)?
4. Adjuncting in Chicago: Even though I was surprised by the lack of history adjuncts in this Chronicle of Higher Education forum, as well as disappointed in the somewhat misleading title, the forum looks to me like a reasonable representation of part-time college-level instruction in Chicago.
5. HASTAC: My Chicago colleague Michael Kramer alerted me to a new player in digital academia/scholarship called HASTAC. It's short for Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. In other words, it's an interdisciplinary endeavor. Here's their about page and a recent forum on the notion of democratizing knowledge.
6. The Misuse of Good Ideas: I wonder if a new category of anti-intellectualism should involve the intentional misuse of good ideas. A prominent example I have in mind derives from, but is not centered on, Gerald Graff's injunction to "teach the controversy" (but Graff is not the object of my concern here). For the unfamiliar, he delivered this idea in his 1992 book, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W.W. Norton). The notion was expanded upon in an essay collection edited by William E. Cain, titled Teaching the Conflicts: Gerald Graff, Curricular Reform, and the Culture Wars (New York: Garland, 1994).
I have just learned, however, that Graff's idea was picked by Intelligent Design proponents as a means to wedge curricular debates in the evolution versus creationism drama. This Wikipedia entry, if it can be trusted, lays out the situation. The entry notes that Graff is perhaps chagrined at the misuse of his idea.
7. "Integrating the Life of the Mind" at the University of Chicago: This is a new web exhibit hosted and constructed by the University of Chicago's Special Collection Research Center in conjunction with Institute for Advanced Study professor, and former University of Chicago dean, Danielle Allen. I see the exhibit as a kind of partial rough draft of the history of African-American intellectuals in Chicago.
8. Salon Writer Probes the Mind of Glenn Beck: Alexander Zaitchik traces Beck's intellectual roots to Willard Cleon Skousen (1913-2006).
9. Educating Intellectuals: It looks like Walt Disney's Baby Einstein videos are not helping fight anti-intellectualism in America. I guess we'll have to concentrate again on K-16 education.
2. "Politics and Letters": This is the name of James Livingston's weblog. Professor Livingston will be giving the plenary at the Second Annual USIH Conference next month in NYC. The title of his paper is: "Seeing, Hearing, and Writing the End of Modernity: From Reading Pragmatism to Watching Movies."
3. Praise for Liberal Arts Colleges---From An Unusual Source: Three Chinese students reflect on the value of American-style liberal arts colleges in a book dedicated to Chinese audiences. I wonder about the relative and absolute numbers of first and second-generation Chinese that have attended liberal arts colleges since, say, the 1960s? The interview in the linked InsideHigherEd article contains culturally-specific insights about, as well as validation of, the value of a liberal arts education. Broadly speaking, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of medium and long-term changes might result in China if a critical mass of the Chinese increased attendance in these kinds of schools? And if change came about, would it feel like old-school cultural diplomacy (slow change from the outside in), or a new, twenty-first century Chinese cultural revolution (inside-out change)?
4. Adjuncting in Chicago: Even though I was surprised by the lack of history adjuncts in this Chronicle of Higher Education forum, as well as disappointed in the somewhat misleading title, the forum looks to me like a reasonable representation of part-time college-level instruction in Chicago.
5. HASTAC: My Chicago colleague Michael Kramer alerted me to a new player in digital academia/scholarship called HASTAC. It's short for Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. In other words, it's an interdisciplinary endeavor. Here's their about page and a recent forum on the notion of democratizing knowledge.
6. The Misuse of Good Ideas: I wonder if a new category of anti-intellectualism should involve the intentional misuse of good ideas. A prominent example I have in mind derives from, but is not centered on, Gerald Graff's injunction to "teach the controversy" (but Graff is not the object of my concern here). For the unfamiliar, he delivered this idea in his 1992 book, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W.W. Norton). The notion was expanded upon in an essay collection edited by William E. Cain, titled Teaching the Conflicts: Gerald Graff, Curricular Reform, and the Culture Wars (New York: Garland, 1994).
I have just learned, however, that Graff's idea was picked by Intelligent Design proponents as a means to wedge curricular debates in the evolution versus creationism drama. This Wikipedia entry, if it can be trusted, lays out the situation. The entry notes that Graff is perhaps chagrined at the misuse of his idea.
7. "Integrating the Life of the Mind" at the University of Chicago: This is a new web exhibit hosted and constructed by the University of Chicago's Special Collection Research Center in conjunction with Institute for Advanced Study professor, and former University of Chicago dean, Danielle Allen. I see the exhibit as a kind of partial rough draft of the history of African-American intellectuals in Chicago.
8. Salon Writer Probes the Mind of Glenn Beck: Alexander Zaitchik traces Beck's intellectual roots to Willard Cleon Skousen (1913-2006).
9. Educating Intellectuals: It looks like Walt Disney's Baby Einstein videos are not helping fight anti-intellectualism in America. I guess we'll have to concentrate again on K-16 education.
Rabu, 21 Oktober 2009
Brow-Beaten, or The Heimlich Maneuver
There's an interesting conversation afoot in two threads over on Crooked Timber about highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow (first post here, second here), which keeps leaping back and forth between intellectual history (the conversation begins with the 1949 Life magazine chart of highbrow, upper middlebrow, lower middlebrow, and lowbrow taste) and contemporary cultural analysis. In short, our kind of thing (or at least, my kind of thing....no need to unnecessarily implicate my fellow USIHers!).
Along the way we get some Lawrence Levine, a dash of Christopher Lasch, references to a couple recent books that I didn't know but really should have (just what I need....additions to the reading list), and, of course, Bourdieu sauvé des eaux.
Perhaps inevitably, it turns out there's an (actually interesting looking) blog devoted to this pursuit: Hilobrow. In the second Crooked Timber thread, Josh Glenn, one of the Hilorophants, complicates things:
Who says intellectual history is dead?
Along the way we get some Lawrence Levine, a dash of Christopher Lasch, references to a couple recent books that I didn't know but really should have (just what I need....additions to the reading list), and, of course, Bourdieu sauvé des eaux.
Perhaps inevitably, it turns out there's an (actually interesting looking) blog devoted to this pursuit: Hilobrow. In the second Crooked Timber thread, Josh Glenn, one of the Hilorophants, complicates things:
Over at Hilobrow.com ... we agree with Bourdieu that aesthetics and lifestyle choices aren’t entirely independent of social class. Though (along with Carl Wilson) we reject the reductionism of his Distinction, we do rely on Bourdieu’s notion of the “disposition” (a tendency to act in a specified way, to take on a certain position in any field) and the “habitus” (the choice of positions in a field, according to one’s disposition). We’ve named and located 10 bourdieuian dispositions — 4 heimlich (Highbrow, Lowbrow, Neo-Aristocratic (Anti-Lowbrow), Quasi-Populist (Anti-Highbrow)); 2 gemütlich (High Middlebrow, or what Dwight Macdonald called Midcult; and Low Middlebrow, which Macdonald, following Adorno, called Masscult); 2 unheimlich (Nobrow, not to be confused with John Seabrook’s confused use of the term; and Hilobrow, our own coinage); and then there’s Unbrow, which Van Wyck Brooks confusingly called Lowbrow. There are various habituses possible within each of these dispositions, but since the mid-17th-century, these dispositions have formed into an invisible matrix of influence.
Who says intellectual history is dead?
Brow-Beaten, or The Heimlich Maneuver
There's an interesting conversation afoot in two threads over on Crooked Timber about highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow (first post here, second here), which keeps leaping back and forth between intellectual history (the conversation begins with the 1949 Life magazine chart of highbrow, upper middlebrow, lower middlebrow, and lowbrow taste) and contemporary cultural analysis. In short, our kind of thing (or at least, my kind of thing....no need to unnecessarily implicate my fellow USIHers!).
Along the way we get some Lawrence Levine, a dash of Christopher Lasch, references to a couple recent books that I didn't know but really should have (just what I need....additions to the reading list), and, of course, Bourdieu sauvé des eaux.
Perhaps inevitably, it turns out there's an (actually interesting looking) blog devoted to this pursuit: Hilobrow. In the second Crooked Timber thread, Josh Glenn, one of the Hilorophants, complicates things:
Who says intellectual history is dead?
Along the way we get some Lawrence Levine, a dash of Christopher Lasch, references to a couple recent books that I didn't know but really should have (just what I need....additions to the reading list), and, of course, Bourdieu sauvé des eaux.
Perhaps inevitably, it turns out there's an (actually interesting looking) blog devoted to this pursuit: Hilobrow. In the second Crooked Timber thread, Josh Glenn, one of the Hilorophants, complicates things:
Over at Hilobrow.com ... we agree with Bourdieu that aesthetics and lifestyle choices aren’t entirely independent of social class. Though (along with Carl Wilson) we reject the reductionism of his Distinction, we do rely on Bourdieu’s notion of the “disposition” (a tendency to act in a specified way, to take on a certain position in any field) and the “habitus” (the choice of positions in a field, according to one’s disposition). We’ve named and located 10 bourdieuian dispositions — 4 heimlich (Highbrow, Lowbrow, Neo-Aristocratic (Anti-Lowbrow), Quasi-Populist (Anti-Highbrow)); 2 gemütlich (High Middlebrow, or what Dwight Macdonald called Midcult; and Low Middlebrow, which Macdonald, following Adorno, called Masscult); 2 unheimlich (Nobrow, not to be confused with John Seabrook’s confused use of the term; and Hilobrow, our own coinage); and then there’s Unbrow, which Van Wyck Brooks confusingly called Lowbrow. There are various habituses possible within each of these dispositions, but since the mid-17th-century, these dispositions have formed into an invisible matrix of influence.
Who says intellectual history is dead?
Selasa, 20 Oktober 2009
Lauren's Light Listening and a thought on Interdisciplinarity
I'm a Podcast junky. They are a great way to get through my commute, house cleaning, and exercise. Also, a good way to try to sate the insatiable curiosity about everything that had to be narrowed down to a subject that would fit a dissertation. Whenever I get excited about something I've listened to, I remember a comment I read when studying interdisciplinarity--that scholars tend to decry the way their own field is treated in the media, but then turn around and rely upon the media to understand other fields.
With that caveat, I'd like to point out this week's Radio Lab about the potential for change in (human) nature. I still remember sitting in Dagmar Herzog's class my second year in grad school, being introduced to the idea that human nature was malleable over time, particularly in the sense that our understanding of it is. So it was interesting to hear Radio Lab, a science show put on by WNYC, take on the idea. The producers depended largely upon evolutionary biologists for their stories. When reading or hearing about evolutionary biology, my historian's backbone always stiffens a bit. That field seems to ignore human history in order to connect the impulses of our ape or hunter gather ancestors to our compulsions today.
Yet I wonder what a project connecting a historical perspective on human nature with an evolutionary biologist's would look like.
Daniel Wickberg in his Historically Speaking essay mentioned the different fields with which intellectual history works well:
With that caveat, I'd like to point out this week's Radio Lab about the potential for change in (human) nature. I still remember sitting in Dagmar Herzog's class my second year in grad school, being introduced to the idea that human nature was malleable over time, particularly in the sense that our understanding of it is. So it was interesting to hear Radio Lab, a science show put on by WNYC, take on the idea. The producers depended largely upon evolutionary biologists for their stories. When reading or hearing about evolutionary biology, my historian's backbone always stiffens a bit. That field seems to ignore human history in order to connect the impulses of our ape or hunter gather ancestors to our compulsions today.
Yet I wonder what a project connecting a historical perspective on human nature with an evolutionary biologist's would look like.
Daniel Wickberg in his Historically Speaking essay mentioned the different fields with which intellectual history works well:
Intellectual historians often find themselves in dialogue with those at the margins of other disciplines: the philosophers who are less interested in analytical philosophy and more interested in the history of philosophy; the political scientists who study the history of political theory; the self-reflexive anthropologists; the sociologists of ideas and intellectuals; the literary scholars of discourse.It would be good for us to keep this in mind as we try to expand the influence of this blog, and maybe even seek out radically different fields interested in similar questions.
Lauren's Light Listening and a thought on Interdisciplinarity
I'm a Podcast junky. They are a great way to get through my commute, house cleaning, and exercise. Also, a good way to try to sate the insatiable curiosity about everything that had to be narrowed down to a subject that would fit a dissertation. Whenever I get excited about something I've listened to, I remember a comment I read when studying interdisciplinarity--that scholars tend to decry the way their own field is treated in the media, but then turn around and rely upon the media to understand other fields.
With that caveat, I'd like to point out this week's Radio Lab about the potential for change in (human) nature. I still remember sitting in Dagmar Herzog's class my second year in grad school, being introduced to the idea that human nature was malleable over time, particularly in the sense that our understanding of it is. So it was interesting to hear Radio Lab, a science show put on by WNYC, take on the idea. The producers depended largely upon evolutionary biologists for their stories. When reading or hearing about evolutionary biology, my historian's backbone always stiffens a bit. That field seems to ignore human history in order to connect the impulses of our ape or hunter gather ancestors to our compulsions today.
Yet I wonder what a project connecting a historical perspective on human nature with an evolutionary biologist's would look like.
Daniel Wickberg in his Historically Speaking essay mentioned the different fields with which intellectual history works well:
With that caveat, I'd like to point out this week's Radio Lab about the potential for change in (human) nature. I still remember sitting in Dagmar Herzog's class my second year in grad school, being introduced to the idea that human nature was malleable over time, particularly in the sense that our understanding of it is. So it was interesting to hear Radio Lab, a science show put on by WNYC, take on the idea. The producers depended largely upon evolutionary biologists for their stories. When reading or hearing about evolutionary biology, my historian's backbone always stiffens a bit. That field seems to ignore human history in order to connect the impulses of our ape or hunter gather ancestors to our compulsions today.
Yet I wonder what a project connecting a historical perspective on human nature with an evolutionary biologist's would look like.
Daniel Wickberg in his Historically Speaking essay mentioned the different fields with which intellectual history works well:
Intellectual historians often find themselves in dialogue with those at the margins of other disciplines: the philosophers who are less interested in analytical philosophy and more interested in the history of philosophy; the political scientists who study the history of political theory; the self-reflexive anthropologists; the sociologists of ideas and intellectuals; the literary scholars of discourse.It would be good for us to keep this in mind as we try to expand the influence of this blog, and maybe even seek out radically different fields interested in similar questions.
Senin, 19 Oktober 2009
Public Service Announcement for Associate Professors
Job Opening that caught my eye:
University of Maryland - College Park - Associate Professor, U.S. Cultural and/or Intellectual History
Location: Maryland, United States
Institution Type: College/University
Position Type: Associate Professor
Submitted: Friday, October 16th, 2009
Contact Info:
US History Search Committee
Attn: Courtenay Lanier
2115 Francis Scott Key
Department of History
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
University of Maryland - College Park - Associate Professor, U.S. Cultural and/or Intellectual History
Location: Maryland, United States
Institution Type: College/University
Position Type: Associate Professor
Submitted: Friday, October 16th, 2009
| Main Category: U.S. History |
| Secondary Categories: | Intellectual History |
| The Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, seeks to appoint a scholar with a distinguished record of publication and teaching for the Burke Chair in U.S. cultural and/or intellectual history. Period specialization is open (17th through 20th centuries). This appointment will be made at the Associate Professor level. The University of Maryland is an AA/EOE employer; it encourages applications from women and minorities. Candidates should submit letter of application, c.v. and three letters of recommendation to the attention of Ms. Courtenay Lanier, US History Search Committee, Department of History, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, 20742-7315. For best consideration, applications should be received by February 15, 2010. |
US History Search Committee
Attn: Courtenay Lanier
2115 Francis Scott Key
Department of History
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Website: http://www.history.umd.edu
Public Service Announcement for Associate Professors
Job Opening that caught my eye:
University of Maryland - College Park - Associate Professor, U.S. Cultural and/or Intellectual History
Location: Maryland, United States
Institution Type: College/University
Position Type: Associate Professor
Submitted: Friday, October 16th, 2009
Contact Info:
US History Search Committee
Attn: Courtenay Lanier
2115 Francis Scott Key
Department of History
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
University of Maryland - College Park - Associate Professor, U.S. Cultural and/or Intellectual History
Location: Maryland, United States
Institution Type: College/University
Position Type: Associate Professor
Submitted: Friday, October 16th, 2009
| Main Category: U.S. History |
| Secondary Categories: | Intellectual History |
| The Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, seeks to appoint a scholar with a distinguished record of publication and teaching for the Burke Chair in U.S. cultural and/or intellectual history. Period specialization is open (17th through 20th centuries). This appointment will be made at the Associate Professor level. The University of Maryland is an AA/EOE employer; it encourages applications from women and minorities. Candidates should submit letter of application, c.v. and three letters of recommendation to the attention of Ms. Courtenay Lanier, US History Search Committee, Department of History, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, 20742-7315. For best consideration, applications should be received by February 15, 2010. |
US History Search Committee
Attn: Courtenay Lanier
2115 Francis Scott Key
Department of History
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Website: http://www.history.umd.edu
Tim's Light Reading (10/19/2009)
1. Score One For Blurring Genre Lines With Intellectual History: Dan Ernst at the Legal History Blog highlights a new release that qualifies, I think, as a work on the intellectual history of the U.S. working class: Catherine L. Fisk's Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press). I categorize this under "process and technical innovation" as viable parts of the life of the mind.
2. Revisiting the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: At Religion in American History, Randall Stephens, co-editor of RAH with Paul Harvey, offers snacks from the meal that was a conference hosted by Gordon College—"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 15 Years Later." Stephens walks us through the good and the bad in relation to Mark Noll's classic, and more recent scholarship, by recapping some of the conference's panels. As a former Evangelical, I particularly wish I had been there.
3. Perversely Satisfying: It's somewhat self-serving, professionally speaking, but I cannot help but find stories like this perversely satisfying. I particularly love this paragraph from Mr. Shears's HNN promotional summary:
Unoriginal Misunderstanding...certainly does not claim to settle the issue of what press freedom meant in the 18th century; one of the few certainties in this area is that more evidence will be turned up and further examination of historical evidence will allow us to understand it better. Yet originalists say we must base our legal interpretation of the press freedom guarantee on what judges think its meaning may have been two centuries ago. What qualifies judges to declare, as a matter of law, what historical evidence is worthy of consideration and which interpretation is correct? Has any judge ever been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court because of his or her abilities as a historian? As historical scholarship evolves and shifts, would Constitutional interpretation change with it? What standards apply to judicial determination of history? Without addressing these questions, originalism merely allows judges to cloak their own views as historical truths. Thus, when history is addressed in court opinions, you don’t find discussion of the uncertainties of what we know about the past or all the complexities and contradictions that the study of history reveals, but vehement argument about how historical evidence supports the outcome the judge believes to be correct.
4. A History of History Departments in the U.S.: Sometime in August or early September I printed William G. Palmer's article from the June 2009 issue of Historically Speaking. It took me awhile to read the piece, but I was pleased find in it a number of interesting anecdotes from the author's new book, titled Gentleman's Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States, 1940-1980. For instance:
- Many departments in the 1920s and 1930s had "dollar-a year men"---independently wealthy scholars who essentially worked for nothing (or close to nothing). [Me: It's nice to know that adjuncting was formerly an elite, gentlemanly occupation. But having an elite history isn't going to go get those student loans paid, no?!]
- Palmer credits James B. Conant with moving the focus of history faculty credentials away from teaching and toward publication and scholarly achievement.
- George Pierson, formerly chair of Yale's History Department, hired C. Vann Woodward to replace David Potter on the grounds of two vocal recommendations from John Morton Blum and Edmund Morgan, and five minutes of deliberation.
- Pierson also had declared that a woman would teach at Yale only over his dead body. But he ended up hiring the department's first female faculty member, Mary Wright, in 1959.
- Wisconsin's William Appleman Williams directed 37 completed dissertations in an 11-year span.
Apart from these tidbits, another interesting fact about Palmer's book is its publisher: Booksurge, an on-demand publishing division of Amazon.com. This might be the first intellectual history I've seen published in the current on-demand style.
5. A Third Way---In Biology: This InsideHigherEd piece chronicles of the efforts of biologists trying to teach evolution in Christian colleges with faculty confessional statements containing conservative clauses, or interpretations, on biblical inerrancy. I was particularly intrigued by references to the BioLogos Foundation and this book by Richard Colling. From my own readings on the subjects of concern, I thought that "Intelligent Design" could have some crossover with strains of evolutionary theory (if not random natural selection) by way of chaos theory math. By this I mean that apparently "chance" happenings, or developments, are not always chaotic or unintelligible. I wonder if there's a general history out there on the teaching of biology in Christian educational institutions that ranges beyond the Scopes Trial and the 1920s? ...Whenever I ask myself this kind of question I'm invariably surprised by the richness of existing scholarship.
6. Intellectual History on The Daily Show: Jon Stewart interviewed Jennifer Burns, a former student of David Hollinger's, for the Oct. 15 The Daily Show about her new book on Ayn Rand. - TL
2. Revisiting the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: At Religion in American History, Randall Stephens, co-editor of RAH with Paul Harvey, offers snacks from the meal that was a conference hosted by Gordon College—"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 15 Years Later." Stephens walks us through the good and the bad in relation to Mark Noll's classic, and more recent scholarship, by recapping some of the conference's panels. As a former Evangelical, I particularly wish I had been there.
3. Perversely Satisfying: It's somewhat self-serving, professionally speaking, but I cannot help but find stories like this perversely satisfying. I particularly love this paragraph from Mr. Shears's HNN promotional summary:
Unoriginal Misunderstanding...certainly does not claim to settle the issue of what press freedom meant in the 18th century; one of the few certainties in this area is that more evidence will be turned up and further examination of historical evidence will allow us to understand it better. Yet originalists say we must base our legal interpretation of the press freedom guarantee on what judges think its meaning may have been two centuries ago. What qualifies judges to declare, as a matter of law, what historical evidence is worthy of consideration and which interpretation is correct? Has any judge ever been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court because of his or her abilities as a historian? As historical scholarship evolves and shifts, would Constitutional interpretation change with it? What standards apply to judicial determination of history? Without addressing these questions, originalism merely allows judges to cloak their own views as historical truths. Thus, when history is addressed in court opinions, you don’t find discussion of the uncertainties of what we know about the past or all the complexities and contradictions that the study of history reveals, but vehement argument about how historical evidence supports the outcome the judge believes to be correct.
4. A History of History Departments in the U.S.: Sometime in August or early September I printed William G. Palmer's article from the June 2009 issue of Historically Speaking. It took me awhile to read the piece, but I was pleased find in it a number of interesting anecdotes from the author's new book, titled Gentleman's Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States, 1940-1980. For instance:
- Many departments in the 1920s and 1930s had "dollar-a year men"---independently wealthy scholars who essentially worked for nothing (or close to nothing). [Me: It's nice to know that adjuncting was formerly an elite, gentlemanly occupation. But having an elite history isn't going to go get those student loans paid, no?!]
- Palmer credits James B. Conant with moving the focus of history faculty credentials away from teaching and toward publication and scholarly achievement.
- George Pierson, formerly chair of Yale's History Department, hired C. Vann Woodward to replace David Potter on the grounds of two vocal recommendations from John Morton Blum and Edmund Morgan, and five minutes of deliberation.
- Pierson also had declared that a woman would teach at Yale only over his dead body. But he ended up hiring the department's first female faculty member, Mary Wright, in 1959.
- Wisconsin's William Appleman Williams directed 37 completed dissertations in an 11-year span.
Apart from these tidbits, another interesting fact about Palmer's book is its publisher: Booksurge, an on-demand publishing division of Amazon.com. This might be the first intellectual history I've seen published in the current on-demand style.
5. A Third Way---In Biology: This InsideHigherEd piece chronicles of the efforts of biologists trying to teach evolution in Christian colleges with faculty confessional statements containing conservative clauses, or interpretations, on biblical inerrancy. I was particularly intrigued by references to the BioLogos Foundation and this book by Richard Colling. From my own readings on the subjects of concern, I thought that "Intelligent Design" could have some crossover with strains of evolutionary theory (if not random natural selection) by way of chaos theory math. By this I mean that apparently "chance" happenings, or developments, are not always chaotic or unintelligible. I wonder if there's a general history out there on the teaching of biology in Christian educational institutions that ranges beyond the Scopes Trial and the 1920s? ...Whenever I ask myself this kind of question I'm invariably surprised by the richness of existing scholarship.
6. Intellectual History on The Daily Show: Jon Stewart interviewed Jennifer Burns, a former student of David Hollinger's, for the Oct. 15 The Daily Show about her new book on Ayn Rand. - TL
Tim's Light Reading (10/19/2009)
1. Score One For Blurring Genre Lines With Intellectual History: Dan Ernst at the Legal History Blog highlights a new release that qualifies, I think, as a work on the intellectual history of the U.S. working class: Catherine L. Fisk's Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press). I categorize this under "process and technical innovation" as viable parts of the life of the mind.
2. Revisiting the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: At Religion in American History, Randall Stephens, co-editor of RAH with Paul Harvey, offers snacks from the meal that was a conference hosted by Gordon College—"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 15 Years Later." Stephens walks us through the good and the bad in relation to Mark Noll's classic, and more recent scholarship, by recapping some of the conference's panels. As a former Evangelical, I particularly wish I had been there.
3. Perversely Satisfying: It's somewhat self-serving, professionally speaking, but I cannot help but find stories like this perversely satisfying. I particularly love this paragraph from Mr. Shears's HNN promotional summary:
Unoriginal Misunderstanding...certainly does not claim to settle the issue of what press freedom meant in the 18th century; one of the few certainties in this area is that more evidence will be turned up and further examination of historical evidence will allow us to understand it better. Yet originalists say we must base our legal interpretation of the press freedom guarantee on what judges think its meaning may have been two centuries ago. What qualifies judges to declare, as a matter of law, what historical evidence is worthy of consideration and which interpretation is correct? Has any judge ever been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court because of his or her abilities as a historian? As historical scholarship evolves and shifts, would Constitutional interpretation change with it? What standards apply to judicial determination of history? Without addressing these questions, originalism merely allows judges to cloak their own views as historical truths. Thus, when history is addressed in court opinions, you don’t find discussion of the uncertainties of what we know about the past or all the complexities and contradictions that the study of history reveals, but vehement argument about how historical evidence supports the outcome the judge believes to be correct.
4. A History of History Departments in the U.S.: Sometime in August or early September I printed William G. Palmer's article from the June 2009 issue of Historically Speaking. It took me awhile to read the piece, but I was pleased find in it a number of interesting anecdotes from the author's new book, titled Gentleman's Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States, 1940-1980. For instance:
- Many departments in the 1920s and 1930s had "dollar-a year men"---independently wealthy scholars who essentially worked for nothing (or close to nothing). [Me: It's nice to know that adjuncting was formerly an elite, gentlemanly occupation. But having an elite history isn't going to go get those student loans paid, no?!]
- Palmer credits James B. Conant with moving the focus of history faculty credentials away from teaching and toward publication and scholarly achievement.
- George Pierson, formerly chair of Yale's History Department, hired C. Vann Woodward to replace David Potter on the grounds of two vocal recommendations from John Morton Blum and Edmund Morgan, and five minutes of deliberation.
- Pierson also had declared that a woman would teach at Yale only over his dead body. But he ended up hiring the department's first female faculty member, Mary Wright, in 1959.
- Wisconsin's William Appleman Williams directed 37 completed dissertations in an 11-year span.
Apart from these tidbits, another interesting fact about Palmer's book is its publisher: Booksurge, an on-demand publishing division of Amazon.com. This might be the first intellectual history I've seen published in the current on-demand style.
5. A Third Way---In Biology: This InsideHigherEd piece chronicles of the efforts of biologists trying to teach evolution in Christian colleges with faculty confessional statements containing conservative clauses, or interpretations, on biblical inerrancy. I was particularly intrigued by references to the BioLogos Foundation and this book by Richard Colling. From my own readings on the subjects of concern, I thought that "Intelligent Design" could have some crossover with strains of evolutionary theory (if not random natural selection) by way of chaos theory math. By this I mean that apparently "chance" happenings, or developments, are not always chaotic or unintelligible. I wonder if there's a general history out there on the teaching of biology in Christian educational institutions that ranges beyond the Scopes Trial and the 1920s? ...Whenever I ask myself this kind of question I'm invariably surprised by the richness of existing scholarship.
6. Intellectual History on The Daily Show: Jon Stewart interviewed Jennifer Burns, a former student of David Hollinger's, for the Oct. 15 The Daily Show about her new book on Ayn Rand. - TL
2. Revisiting the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: At Religion in American History, Randall Stephens, co-editor of RAH with Paul Harvey, offers snacks from the meal that was a conference hosted by Gordon College—"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 15 Years Later." Stephens walks us through the good and the bad in relation to Mark Noll's classic, and more recent scholarship, by recapping some of the conference's panels. As a former Evangelical, I particularly wish I had been there.
3. Perversely Satisfying: It's somewhat self-serving, professionally speaking, but I cannot help but find stories like this perversely satisfying. I particularly love this paragraph from Mr. Shears's HNN promotional summary:
Unoriginal Misunderstanding...certainly does not claim to settle the issue of what press freedom meant in the 18th century; one of the few certainties in this area is that more evidence will be turned up and further examination of historical evidence will allow us to understand it better. Yet originalists say we must base our legal interpretation of the press freedom guarantee on what judges think its meaning may have been two centuries ago. What qualifies judges to declare, as a matter of law, what historical evidence is worthy of consideration and which interpretation is correct? Has any judge ever been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court because of his or her abilities as a historian? As historical scholarship evolves and shifts, would Constitutional interpretation change with it? What standards apply to judicial determination of history? Without addressing these questions, originalism merely allows judges to cloak their own views as historical truths. Thus, when history is addressed in court opinions, you don’t find discussion of the uncertainties of what we know about the past or all the complexities and contradictions that the study of history reveals, but vehement argument about how historical evidence supports the outcome the judge believes to be correct.
4. A History of History Departments in the U.S.: Sometime in August or early September I printed William G. Palmer's article from the June 2009 issue of Historically Speaking. It took me awhile to read the piece, but I was pleased find in it a number of interesting anecdotes from the author's new book, titled Gentleman's Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States, 1940-1980. For instance:
- Many departments in the 1920s and 1930s had "dollar-a year men"---independently wealthy scholars who essentially worked for nothing (or close to nothing). [Me: It's nice to know that adjuncting was formerly an elite, gentlemanly occupation. But having an elite history isn't going to go get those student loans paid, no?!]
- Palmer credits James B. Conant with moving the focus of history faculty credentials away from teaching and toward publication and scholarly achievement.
- George Pierson, formerly chair of Yale's History Department, hired C. Vann Woodward to replace David Potter on the grounds of two vocal recommendations from John Morton Blum and Edmund Morgan, and five minutes of deliberation.
- Pierson also had declared that a woman would teach at Yale only over his dead body. But he ended up hiring the department's first female faculty member, Mary Wright, in 1959.
- Wisconsin's William Appleman Williams directed 37 completed dissertations in an 11-year span.
Apart from these tidbits, another interesting fact about Palmer's book is its publisher: Booksurge, an on-demand publishing division of Amazon.com. This might be the first intellectual history I've seen published in the current on-demand style.
5. A Third Way---In Biology: This InsideHigherEd piece chronicles of the efforts of biologists trying to teach evolution in Christian colleges with faculty confessional statements containing conservative clauses, or interpretations, on biblical inerrancy. I was particularly intrigued by references to the BioLogos Foundation and this book by Richard Colling. From my own readings on the subjects of concern, I thought that "Intelligent Design" could have some crossover with strains of evolutionary theory (if not random natural selection) by way of chaos theory math. By this I mean that apparently "chance" happenings, or developments, are not always chaotic or unintelligible. I wonder if there's a general history out there on the teaching of biology in Christian educational institutions that ranges beyond the Scopes Trial and the 1920s? ...Whenever I ask myself this kind of question I'm invariably surprised by the richness of existing scholarship.
6. Intellectual History on The Daily Show: Jon Stewart interviewed Jennifer Burns, a former student of David Hollinger's, for the Oct. 15 The Daily Show about her new book on Ayn Rand. - TL
Kamis, 15 Oktober 2009
Moving Beyond "Everywhere and Nowhere"
Reflections On Historically Speaking's Forum About The State Of U.S. Intellectual History
(Part III of III)
by Tim Lacy
[Recap: In Part I and Part II, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. Here I conclude with a relatively short discussion of the final category of my tripartite taxonomy and hierarchy.]
Internal Issues
The bottom-most category of importance in the Historically Speaking forum are issues related to professionalism and professional structures. These include: subfield recognition and organization (i.e. identity); hiring and job availability; departmental and professional politics; historiographical trends; perceptions of the subfield; finding publishing venues; promoting and organizing conferences; and creating professional organizations.
I characterize these as varieties of internal concerns.
They are pertinent to those whose livelihoods are staked on the health of the subfield, but few on the outside---consumers of intellectual history, if you will---care about these issues. These topics, while necessary, are only important in a 'helping' fashion. I foresee that answering questions and solving problems in first two categories will cause internal issues to lessen in urgency.
The problem with internal concerns is that they often feel tedious, whiney, petty, and self-serving. McClay aptly summed this negative side up in a word: "careerism" (p. 21). Because of this I will limit my discussion to only a few issues---even though all four forum contributors make legitimate points about internal concerns. I do not mean to underplay their observations about jobs, neglect, decline, status, pride, past "eminence," and Igo's influence-versus-autonomy dichotomy (p. 19) by failing to summarize them here. My primary concerns are identity, infrastructure, and community. I intentionally underscore these particular internal issues because they are forward-looking and positive.
To address my three concerns I am increasingly of the opinion that a USIH society must be formed. I see this as necessary, if not convenient or fun. This society would provide the structural legitimacy needed to affiliate with either OAH or AHA. I am unaware of THS's policies on partnering or affiliation. But neither of the older organizations contains a constitutional allowance for sub-field solidarity building. To link yourself to a larger organization, you have to establish your identity independently and prior, then build a partnership.
Establishing a society will provide a sense of identity and, hopefully, community. The primary goal of the society should be to host a regular conference. Whether regularity is defined as an annual or bi-annual meeting is of less importance than creating a home forum where professionals are guaranteed numerous opportunities for presenting historical topics related to the life of the mind, history of ideas, philosophy, thought-promoting institutions, etc. This home forum will be a prime place for feedback from like-mined historians on your work. And that self-correcting feedback will help move the field forward---opening new avenues for research and presentation, as well as preventing past mistakes in topical emphasis (e.g. elitism). Practically speaking, aspirants and professionals will also be able to look to the society as both a forum for concerns and place where actions might be taken.
I propose, therefore, the creation of a 501(c)(3) called either "The U.S. Intellectual History Conference" or the "U.S. Intellectual History Society." This group would not, initially at least, be concerned about funds. The fee for entry could be as low as $1 per year. The purpose of the society would be to create a friendly, democratic structure that, to begin, provides intellectual historians with the option of partnering a subfield conference with OAH, THS, or AHA.
If members choose to remain independent of either superstructure, then the group would have officers whose primary concern is the maintenance of the weblog and the annual (or bi-annual) administration of the USIH conference. If the organization chose to raise membership rates in the future for the purposes of conference stability and the distribution of funds for scholarly endeavors (e.g. award for best paper, travel grants for grad students), then that's an option.
Speaking personally, I am willing to help in this endeavor. I cannot, however, take the lead because of a pressing concern to draft my first book (i.e. turn my dissertation into a book manuscript). That is my first professional priority for the next 12-24 months. Indeed, this series of reflections on History Speaking's forum will be my last lengthy online post at USIH for some time. I think my USIH presence will be reduced to quick-hit "light reading" posts.
Conclusion
My purpose in summarizing and extending the forum's contents is to re-present the rich material therein in an alternative fashion that may speak to another audience. Other tropes are available, but the external-relational-internal structure allowed me to get behind the forum's well-written, individual reflections in order to systematize and prioritize the issues. But if my presentation is inadequate, one can always return to the forum. I will reiterate that I felt every essay in it held astute points presented persuasively.
But, to me, some prioritization of the issues raised felt pressing. Why? On the one hand, in terms of perception, the potential exists for non-intellectual historians to view, in the extreme, some of the concerns raised in the forum as self-serving. This falls under McClay's "careerism" observation. As such, it is therefore not only an outside-in problem. It's an internal one that perpetuates a destructive, dog-chasing-tail theme in some subfield discussions. I have been guilty of this in the past.
On the other hand, I wanted to convey what I felt were the essential, highest-priority issues moving forward. There is most certainly a positive agenda to be discerned in the essays---ways to move beyond intellectual history's current "everywhere and nowhere" status. First is the work of foregrounding ideas, thought processes, and thinkers in history. Everything else a distant second. Creating a low-key society should aid the primary cause. - TL
(Part III of III)
by Tim Lacy
[Recap: In Part I and Part II, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. Here I conclude with a relatively short discussion of the final category of my tripartite taxonomy and hierarchy.]
Internal Issues
The bottom-most category of importance in the Historically Speaking forum are issues related to professionalism and professional structures. These include: subfield recognition and organization (i.e. identity); hiring and job availability; departmental and professional politics; historiographical trends; perceptions of the subfield; finding publishing venues; promoting and organizing conferences; and creating professional organizations.
I characterize these as varieties of internal concerns.
They are pertinent to those whose livelihoods are staked on the health of the subfield, but few on the outside---consumers of intellectual history, if you will---care about these issues. These topics, while necessary, are only important in a 'helping' fashion. I foresee that answering questions and solving problems in first two categories will cause internal issues to lessen in urgency. The problem with internal concerns is that they often feel tedious, whiney, petty, and self-serving. McClay aptly summed this negative side up in a word: "careerism" (p. 21). Because of this I will limit my discussion to only a few issues---even though all four forum contributors make legitimate points about internal concerns. I do not mean to underplay their observations about jobs, neglect, decline, status, pride, past "eminence," and Igo's influence-versus-autonomy dichotomy (p. 19) by failing to summarize them here. My primary concerns are identity, infrastructure, and community. I intentionally underscore these particular internal issues because they are forward-looking and positive.
To address my three concerns I am increasingly of the opinion that a USIH society must be formed. I see this as necessary, if not convenient or fun. This society would provide the structural legitimacy needed to affiliate with either OAH or AHA. I am unaware of THS's policies on partnering or affiliation. But neither of the older organizations contains a constitutional allowance for sub-field solidarity building. To link yourself to a larger organization, you have to establish your identity independently and prior, then build a partnership.
Establishing a society will provide a sense of identity and, hopefully, community. The primary goal of the society should be to host a regular conference. Whether regularity is defined as an annual or bi-annual meeting is of less importance than creating a home forum where professionals are guaranteed numerous opportunities for presenting historical topics related to the life of the mind, history of ideas, philosophy, thought-promoting institutions, etc. This home forum will be a prime place for feedback from like-mined historians on your work. And that self-correcting feedback will help move the field forward---opening new avenues for research and presentation, as well as preventing past mistakes in topical emphasis (e.g. elitism). Practically speaking, aspirants and professionals will also be able to look to the society as both a forum for concerns and place where actions might be taken.
I propose, therefore, the creation of a 501(c)(3) called either "The U.S. Intellectual History Conference" or the "U.S. Intellectual History Society." This group would not, initially at least, be concerned about funds. The fee for entry could be as low as $1 per year. The purpose of the society would be to create a friendly, democratic structure that, to begin, provides intellectual historians with the option of partnering a subfield conference with OAH, THS, or AHA.
If members choose to remain independent of either superstructure, then the group would have officers whose primary concern is the maintenance of the weblog and the annual (or bi-annual) administration of the USIH conference. If the organization chose to raise membership rates in the future for the purposes of conference stability and the distribution of funds for scholarly endeavors (e.g. award for best paper, travel grants for grad students), then that's an option.
Speaking personally, I am willing to help in this endeavor. I cannot, however, take the lead because of a pressing concern to draft my first book (i.e. turn my dissertation into a book manuscript). That is my first professional priority for the next 12-24 months. Indeed, this series of reflections on History Speaking's forum will be my last lengthy online post at USIH for some time. I think my USIH presence will be reduced to quick-hit "light reading" posts.
Conclusion
My purpose in summarizing and extending the forum's contents is to re-present the rich material therein in an alternative fashion that may speak to another audience. Other tropes are available, but the external-relational-internal structure allowed me to get behind the forum's well-written, individual reflections in order to systematize and prioritize the issues. But if my presentation is inadequate, one can always return to the forum. I will reiterate that I felt every essay in it held astute points presented persuasively.
But, to me, some prioritization of the issues raised felt pressing. Why? On the one hand, in terms of perception, the potential exists for non-intellectual historians to view, in the extreme, some of the concerns raised in the forum as self-serving. This falls under McClay's "careerism" observation. As such, it is therefore not only an outside-in problem. It's an internal one that perpetuates a destructive, dog-chasing-tail theme in some subfield discussions. I have been guilty of this in the past.
On the other hand, I wanted to convey what I felt were the essential, highest-priority issues moving forward. There is most certainly a positive agenda to be discerned in the essays---ways to move beyond intellectual history's current "everywhere and nowhere" status. First is the work of foregrounding ideas, thought processes, and thinkers in history. Everything else a distant second. Creating a low-key society should aid the primary cause. - TL
Moving Beyond "Everywhere and Nowhere"
Reflections On Historically Speaking's Forum About The State Of U.S. Intellectual History
(Part III of III)
by Tim Lacy
[Recap: In Part I and Part II, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. Here I conclude with a relatively short discussion of the final category of my tripartite taxonomy and hierarchy.]
Internal Issues
The bottom-most category of importance in the Historically Speaking forum are issues related to professionalism and professional structures. These include: subfield recognition and organization (i.e. identity); hiring and job availability; departmental and professional politics; historiographical trends; perceptions of the subfield; finding publishing venues; promoting and organizing conferences; and creating professional organizations.
I characterize these as varieties of internal concerns.They are pertinent to those whose livelihoods are staked on the health of the subfield, but few on the outside---consumers of intellectual history, if you will---care about these issues. These topics, while necessary, are only important in a 'helping' fashion. I foresee that answering questions and solving problems in first two categories will cause internal issues to lessen in urgency.
The problem with internal concerns is that they often feel tedious, whiney, petty, and self-serving. McClay aptly summed this negative side up in a word: "careerism" (p. 21). Because of this I will limit my discussion to only a few issues---even though all four forum contributors make legitimate points about internal concerns. I do not mean to underplay their observations about jobs, neglect, decline, status, pride, past "eminence," and Igo's influence-versus-autonomy dichotomy (p. 19) by failing to summarize them here. My primary concerns are identity, infrastructure, and community. I intentionally underscore these particular internal issues because they are forward-looking and positive.
To address my three concerns I am increasingly of the opinion that a USIH society must be formed. I see this as necessary, if not convenient or fun. This society would provide the structural legitimacy needed to affiliate with either OAH or AHA. I am unaware of THS's policies on partnering or affiliation. But neither of the older organizations contains a constitutional allowance for sub-field solidarity building. To link yourself to a larger organization, you have to establish your identity independently and prior, then build a partnership.
Establishing a society will provide a sense of identity and, hopefully, community. The primary goal of the society should be to host a regular conference. Whether regularity is defined as an annual or bi-annual meeting is of less importance than creating a home forum where professionals are guaranteed numerous opportunities for presenting historical topics related to the life of the mind, history of ideas, philosophy, thought-promoting institutions, etc. This home forum will be a prime place for feedback from like-mined historians on your work. And that self-correcting feedback will help move the field forward---opening new avenues for research and presentation, as well as preventing past mistakes in topical emphasis (e.g. elitism). Practically speaking, aspirants and professionals will also be able to look to the society as both a forum for concerns and place where actions might be taken.
I propose, therefore, the creation of a 501(c)(3) called either "The U.S. Intellectual History Conference" or the "U.S. Intellectual History Society." This group would not, initially at least, be concerned about funds. The fee for entry could be as low as $1 per year. The purpose of the society would be to create a friendly, democratic structure that, to begin, provides intellectual historians with the option of partnering a subfield conference with OAH, THS, or AHA.
If members choose to remain independent of either superstructure, then the group would have officers whose primary concern is the maintenance of the weblog and the annual (or bi-annual) administration of the USIH conference. If the organization chose to raise membership rates in the future for the purposes of conference stability and the distribution of funds for scholarly endeavors (e.g. award for best paper, travel grants for grad students), then that's an option.
Speaking personally, I am willing to help in this endeavor. I cannot, however, take the lead because of a pressing concern to draft my first book (i.e. turn my dissertation into a book manuscript). That is my first professional priority for the next 12-24 months. Indeed, this series of reflections on History Speaking's forum will be my last lengthy online post at USIH for some time. I think my USIH presence will be reduced to quick-hit "light reading" posts.
Conclusion
My purpose in summarizing and extending the forum's contents is to re-present the rich material therein in an alternative fashion that may speak to another audience. Other tropes are available, but the external-relational-internal structure allowed me to get behind the forum's well-written, individual reflections in order to systematize and prioritize the issues. But if my presentation is inadequate, one can always return to the forum. I will reiterate that I felt every essay in it held astute points presented persuasively.
But, to me, some prioritization of the issues raised felt pressing. Why? On the one hand, in terms of perception, the potential exists for non-intellectual historians to view, in the extreme, some of the concerns raised in the forum as self-serving. This falls under McClay's "careerism" observation. As such, it is therefore not only an outside-in problem. It's an internal one that perpetuates a destructive, dog-chasing-tail theme in some subfield discussions. I have been guilty of this in the past.
On the other hand, I wanted to convey what I felt were the essential, highest-priority issues moving forward. There is most certainly a positive agenda to be discerned in the essays---ways to move beyond intellectual history's current "everywhere and nowhere" status. First is the work of foregrounding ideas, thought processes, and thinkers in history. Everything else a distant second. Creating a low-key society should aid the primary cause. - TL
(Part III of III)
by Tim Lacy
[Recap: In Part I and Part II, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. Here I conclude with a relatively short discussion of the final category of my tripartite taxonomy and hierarchy.]
Internal Issues
The bottom-most category of importance in the Historically Speaking forum are issues related to professionalism and professional structures. These include: subfield recognition and organization (i.e. identity); hiring and job availability; departmental and professional politics; historiographical trends; perceptions of the subfield; finding publishing venues; promoting and organizing conferences; and creating professional organizations.
I characterize these as varieties of internal concerns.
They are pertinent to those whose livelihoods are staked on the health of the subfield, but few on the outside---consumers of intellectual history, if you will---care about these issues. These topics, while necessary, are only important in a 'helping' fashion. I foresee that answering questions and solving problems in first two categories will cause internal issues to lessen in urgency. The problem with internal concerns is that they often feel tedious, whiney, petty, and self-serving. McClay aptly summed this negative side up in a word: "careerism" (p. 21). Because of this I will limit my discussion to only a few issues---even though all four forum contributors make legitimate points about internal concerns. I do not mean to underplay their observations about jobs, neglect, decline, status, pride, past "eminence," and Igo's influence-versus-autonomy dichotomy (p. 19) by failing to summarize them here. My primary concerns are identity, infrastructure, and community. I intentionally underscore these particular internal issues because they are forward-looking and positive.
To address my three concerns I am increasingly of the opinion that a USIH society must be formed. I see this as necessary, if not convenient or fun. This society would provide the structural legitimacy needed to affiliate with either OAH or AHA. I am unaware of THS's policies on partnering or affiliation. But neither of the older organizations contains a constitutional allowance for sub-field solidarity building. To link yourself to a larger organization, you have to establish your identity independently and prior, then build a partnership.
Establishing a society will provide a sense of identity and, hopefully, community. The primary goal of the society should be to host a regular conference. Whether regularity is defined as an annual or bi-annual meeting is of less importance than creating a home forum where professionals are guaranteed numerous opportunities for presenting historical topics related to the life of the mind, history of ideas, philosophy, thought-promoting institutions, etc. This home forum will be a prime place for feedback from like-mined historians on your work. And that self-correcting feedback will help move the field forward---opening new avenues for research and presentation, as well as preventing past mistakes in topical emphasis (e.g. elitism). Practically speaking, aspirants and professionals will also be able to look to the society as both a forum for concerns and place where actions might be taken.
I propose, therefore, the creation of a 501(c)(3) called either "The U.S. Intellectual History Conference" or the "U.S. Intellectual History Society." This group would not, initially at least, be concerned about funds. The fee for entry could be as low as $1 per year. The purpose of the society would be to create a friendly, democratic structure that, to begin, provides intellectual historians with the option of partnering a subfield conference with OAH, THS, or AHA.
If members choose to remain independent of either superstructure, then the group would have officers whose primary concern is the maintenance of the weblog and the annual (or bi-annual) administration of the USIH conference. If the organization chose to raise membership rates in the future for the purposes of conference stability and the distribution of funds for scholarly endeavors (e.g. award for best paper, travel grants for grad students), then that's an option.
Speaking personally, I am willing to help in this endeavor. I cannot, however, take the lead because of a pressing concern to draft my first book (i.e. turn my dissertation into a book manuscript). That is my first professional priority for the next 12-24 months. Indeed, this series of reflections on History Speaking's forum will be my last lengthy online post at USIH for some time. I think my USIH presence will be reduced to quick-hit "light reading" posts.
Conclusion
My purpose in summarizing and extending the forum's contents is to re-present the rich material therein in an alternative fashion that may speak to another audience. Other tropes are available, but the external-relational-internal structure allowed me to get behind the forum's well-written, individual reflections in order to systematize and prioritize the issues. But if my presentation is inadequate, one can always return to the forum. I will reiterate that I felt every essay in it held astute points presented persuasively.
But, to me, some prioritization of the issues raised felt pressing. Why? On the one hand, in terms of perception, the potential exists for non-intellectual historians to view, in the extreme, some of the concerns raised in the forum as self-serving. This falls under McClay's "careerism" observation. As such, it is therefore not only an outside-in problem. It's an internal one that perpetuates a destructive, dog-chasing-tail theme in some subfield discussions. I have been guilty of this in the past.
On the other hand, I wanted to convey what I felt were the essential, highest-priority issues moving forward. There is most certainly a positive agenda to be discerned in the essays---ways to move beyond intellectual history's current "everywhere and nowhere" status. First is the work of foregrounding ideas, thought processes, and thinkers in history. Everything else a distant second. Creating a low-key society should aid the primary cause. - TL
Senin, 12 Oktober 2009
Moving Beyond "Everywhere and Nowhere"
Reflections On Historically Speaking's Forum About The State Of U.S. Intellectual History
(Part II of III)
by Tim Lacy
[Recap: In Part I, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. The first post then offered my reflections and extensions on external issues. Today I will move on to the second category. - TL]
Relational Issues
Second in importance are relational issues between the external and internal categories.Relational issues bridge the difference between objective historical concerns, including intellectual history's outward thrust into the larger world, and internal professional topics. Wickberg addresses the relational category in the second-to-last paragraph of his rejoinder. Please indulge me as I relay this long but fundamental paragraph (underscores mine):
Perhaps many of us do not want to see ideas [as "in the driver's seat"], for reasons that McClay points to in his discussion of historians' fascination with historiography. Historians, like social scientists, are inclined to see the categories and ideas they use as having a life apart from the objects they are designed to understand and explain. They want to evaluate theories, categories, and methods on their functional use and intellectual adequacy rather than seeing those very categories and theories as "inside" culture, as part of the very thing being examined and explained; the old object-subject distinctions that have been repeatedly undermined over the past century are still with us. If we historicize such concepts as "class," "attitude," "gender," "assimilation," or "average"---all social scientifically derived keywords that speak to a worldview or sensibility---it makes it harder to present our students [or readers] a naturalized view of the objects such categories represent. . . .I suspect that many historians, as much as they acknowledge this condition in the abstract, in practice want their ideas to be outside of history, rather than all over it.
When I first read the opening sentences of this counterintuitive passage I thought I had read it wrong. Was Wickberg really saying that we are sometimes poor historians with regard to our own beliefs? When I began graduate school in the late 1990s, it seemed that the profession was all about you, as a developing historian, understanding your own theory of history. Theory was the thing. Of course a professional "animus" to this existed even then, as Wickberg relays in his opening piece, in the form of craft-like empiricism (p. 16). But are we now reacting to the old theory debates by participating in what Wickberg called a kind of professional anti-intellectualism, thereby ignoring the importance of intellectual history? (p. 15). And how does thinking about our own theories help relate external and internal issues in the field?
This passage is clearly challenging us to continually be aware of, and revisit, our own controlling assumptions. And it does seem that historians have to be reminded, per their graduate courses in historiography, that history applies to every historian's own philosophy about the field. Recognizing our assumptions, via intellectual history applied inwardly, is necessary for professional health and honesty. The practice of intellectual history and its fraternal twin, the history of ideas, enables historians to be more self-aware. Intellectual history helps historians examine their own metanarratives. The history of ideas presents us with another layer of contextualization that aids the historian in being more holistic and honest about the roots and boundaries of her or his discourse. All people think with and in categories. And if ideas are, or at least can function as, instruments---as John Dewey told us and Wickberg reminds us (p. 23)---it is sometimes appropriate to work backward into the ultimate ideas. This makes intellectual history relevant to the reader and the writer of history. Otherwise it is like analyzing a farm harvest by talking only about the scythe or the plow (the instrument), and ignoring a discussion of the person or the tractor (the power behind the instrument).
To provide an example from personal experience, this process of backing up demonstrated to me how questions of gender, as I understand them, moved into questions about power structure, moral values, religion, and culture. As a graduate student I enjoyed the study of gender and women's history precisely because it brought me back to larger ideas and issues in Western and world history. This is how I came to appreciate the lessons of gender history as a reader. And Wickberg's argument, with which I agree, is that this is necessary for everyone---both in the beginning and as we renew our vows to the field. It demonstrates a relation of the role of intellectual history to both external and internal issues. Showing the links to larger, older, and sometimes more attractive ideas or metanarratives, helps draw the reader into the special lessons that need to be taught about race, class, gender, emotions, etc.
Another relational issue concerns topics studied within U.S. intellectual history and their interest to both the profession and readers of history. For instance, Daniel Wickberg reminds us that a tool of intellectual history, known today as the linguistic turn, and the important "bottom up" dictum of social history, helped feed the cultural turn that displaced intellectual history from the forefront of the discipline. This displacement, partially shown to be true by course offering percentages in Hollinger's essay (p. 17), was easy because the prevailing feeling was that intellectual history concentrated on elites and elite systems of thought---topics no longer in vogue. And such narrow foci led to intellectual history's "neglect" and the growth of exciting new avenues of exploration in cultural and social history. The profession seemed to feel, collectively, that a more democratic history of ideas and thought must necessarily evolve going forward. New topics must be explored.
This was the consensus of the participants in the 1977 Wingspread Conference. As a result a democratization has, in some ways, come about. It is being done in African-American history, as Sarah Igo, Wickberg, and Hollinger all noted (p. 15, 18-19). In addition, I am aware that Caroline Merithew, Toby Higbie, and others are doing work on the thoughts and minds of the working class. I have little doubt that other subfields could put forward representative examples of new topics and topical genre blurring indicative of a democratized U.S. intellectual history.
Interdisciplinary efforts comprise another relational subcategory. Work in this realm provides intellectual history with an opportunity to connect with non-historical disciplines, thereby increasing the audience possibilities for the subfield and anchoring the subfield in academy. If intellectual history shows itself to be useful to scientists, philosophers, literary scholars, and political scientists, then the demand for professional intellectual historians will be high. Wickberg notes that the "interdisciplinary impulse...is peculiarly suited to intellectual history," and that those historians "often find themselves in dialogue with those on the margins of other disciplines," be they philosophers, political scientists, or anthropologists to name a few (p. 16). I agree with this by way of desire and my own reading list, but not so much in person; I don't meet often with philosophers, psychologists, legal scholars, and political scientiests, but I read their works.
Igo observed the same "mixing" as Wickberg, but also that the interdisciplinary movement works from the outside in. She has noticed that ideas "are growing in importance for many scholars, no matter how they categorize themselves" (p. 19). McClay and Hollinger, in addition, believe that intellectual history works best in an interdisciplinary fashion as "a meeting ground…for the dissidents within existing disciplines" (p. 21). For them, it seems, dialogue about ideas, especially marginal ones, defines intellectual history. I find much to like in this notion, and the loss of that feeling would be my only regret if U.S. intellectually history were to be mainstreamed again. Returning to the sub-theme, I fear that hitching the success of intellectual history to the academic interdisciplinary movement may just perpetuate the "everywhere and nowhere" situation so aptly summarized by McClay (p. 20).
Hollinger provides a useful segue into our third category, internal professional concerns, by pointing to intellectual history's interdisciplinary usefulness within the profession in general. He laments how, somewhere in the past 35 years, social history came to be seen as the most wide-ranging and useful subfield even while intellectual history never lost its inter-subfield relevance. In European history the situation still allows for, or favors, intellectual history as a connector, but Hollinger calls this "a genuine blind spot" within the profession on the U.S. side of the ledger.
[This concludes Part II. Part III will explore Internal Issues within the hierarchy of my tripartite taxonomy, and will likely go up here on Thursday, 10/15/2009.]
(Part II of III)
by Tim Lacy
[Recap: In Part I, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. The first post then offered my reflections and extensions on external issues. Today I will move on to the second category. - TL]
Relational Issues
Second in importance are relational issues between the external and internal categories.
Relational issues bridge the difference between objective historical concerns, including intellectual history's outward thrust into the larger world, and internal professional topics. Wickberg addresses the relational category in the second-to-last paragraph of his rejoinder. Please indulge me as I relay this long but fundamental paragraph (underscores mine):Perhaps many of us do not want to see ideas [as "in the driver's seat"], for reasons that McClay points to in his discussion of historians' fascination with historiography. Historians, like social scientists, are inclined to see the categories and ideas they use as having a life apart from the objects they are designed to understand and explain. They want to evaluate theories, categories, and methods on their functional use and intellectual adequacy rather than seeing those very categories and theories as "inside" culture, as part of the very thing being examined and explained; the old object-subject distinctions that have been repeatedly undermined over the past century are still with us. If we historicize such concepts as "class," "attitude," "gender," "assimilation," or "average"---all social scientifically derived keywords that speak to a worldview or sensibility---it makes it harder to present our students [or readers] a naturalized view of the objects such categories represent. . . .I suspect that many historians, as much as they acknowledge this condition in the abstract, in practice want their ideas to be outside of history, rather than all over it.
When I first read the opening sentences of this counterintuitive passage I thought I had read it wrong. Was Wickberg really saying that we are sometimes poor historians with regard to our own beliefs? When I began graduate school in the late 1990s, it seemed that the profession was all about you, as a developing historian, understanding your own theory of history. Theory was the thing. Of course a professional "animus" to this existed even then, as Wickberg relays in his opening piece, in the form of craft-like empiricism (p. 16). But are we now reacting to the old theory debates by participating in what Wickberg called a kind of professional anti-intellectualism, thereby ignoring the importance of intellectual history? (p. 15). And how does thinking about our own theories help relate external and internal issues in the field?
This passage is clearly challenging us to continually be aware of, and revisit, our own controlling assumptions. And it does seem that historians have to be reminded, per their graduate courses in historiography, that history applies to every historian's own philosophy about the field. Recognizing our assumptions, via intellectual history applied inwardly, is necessary for professional health and honesty. The practice of intellectual history and its fraternal twin, the history of ideas, enables historians to be more self-aware. Intellectual history helps historians examine their own metanarratives. The history of ideas presents us with another layer of contextualization that aids the historian in being more holistic and honest about the roots and boundaries of her or his discourse. All people think with and in categories. And if ideas are, or at least can function as, instruments---as John Dewey told us and Wickberg reminds us (p. 23)---it is sometimes appropriate to work backward into the ultimate ideas. This makes intellectual history relevant to the reader and the writer of history. Otherwise it is like analyzing a farm harvest by talking only about the scythe or the plow (the instrument), and ignoring a discussion of the person or the tractor (the power behind the instrument).
To provide an example from personal experience, this process of backing up demonstrated to me how questions of gender, as I understand them, moved into questions about power structure, moral values, religion, and culture. As a graduate student I enjoyed the study of gender and women's history precisely because it brought me back to larger ideas and issues in Western and world history. This is how I came to appreciate the lessons of gender history as a reader. And Wickberg's argument, with which I agree, is that this is necessary for everyone---both in the beginning and as we renew our vows to the field. It demonstrates a relation of the role of intellectual history to both external and internal issues. Showing the links to larger, older, and sometimes more attractive ideas or metanarratives, helps draw the reader into the special lessons that need to be taught about race, class, gender, emotions, etc.
Another relational issue concerns topics studied within U.S. intellectual history and their interest to both the profession and readers of history. For instance, Daniel Wickberg reminds us that a tool of intellectual history, known today as the linguistic turn, and the important "bottom up" dictum of social history, helped feed the cultural turn that displaced intellectual history from the forefront of the discipline. This displacement, partially shown to be true by course offering percentages in Hollinger's essay (p. 17), was easy because the prevailing feeling was that intellectual history concentrated on elites and elite systems of thought---topics no longer in vogue. And such narrow foci led to intellectual history's "neglect" and the growth of exciting new avenues of exploration in cultural and social history. The profession seemed to feel, collectively, that a more democratic history of ideas and thought must necessarily evolve going forward. New topics must be explored.
This was the consensus of the participants in the 1977 Wingspread Conference. As a result a democratization has, in some ways, come about. It is being done in African-American history, as Sarah Igo, Wickberg, and Hollinger all noted (p. 15, 18-19). In addition, I am aware that Caroline Merithew, Toby Higbie, and others are doing work on the thoughts and minds of the working class. I have little doubt that other subfields could put forward representative examples of new topics and topical genre blurring indicative of a democratized U.S. intellectual history.
Interdisciplinary efforts comprise another relational subcategory. Work in this realm provides intellectual history with an opportunity to connect with non-historical disciplines, thereby increasing the audience possibilities for the subfield and anchoring the subfield in academy. If intellectual history shows itself to be useful to scientists, philosophers, literary scholars, and political scientists, then the demand for professional intellectual historians will be high. Wickberg notes that the "interdisciplinary impulse...is peculiarly suited to intellectual history," and that those historians "often find themselves in dialogue with those on the margins of other disciplines," be they philosophers, political scientists, or anthropologists to name a few (p. 16). I agree with this by way of desire and my own reading list, but not so much in person; I don't meet often with philosophers, psychologists, legal scholars, and political scientiests, but I read their works.
Igo observed the same "mixing" as Wickberg, but also that the interdisciplinary movement works from the outside in. She has noticed that ideas "are growing in importance for many scholars, no matter how they categorize themselves" (p. 19). McClay and Hollinger, in addition, believe that intellectual history works best in an interdisciplinary fashion as "a meeting ground…for the dissidents within existing disciplines" (p. 21). For them, it seems, dialogue about ideas, especially marginal ones, defines intellectual history. I find much to like in this notion, and the loss of that feeling would be my only regret if U.S. intellectually history were to be mainstreamed again. Returning to the sub-theme, I fear that hitching the success of intellectual history to the academic interdisciplinary movement may just perpetuate the "everywhere and nowhere" situation so aptly summarized by McClay (p. 20).
Hollinger provides a useful segue into our third category, internal professional concerns, by pointing to intellectual history's interdisciplinary usefulness within the profession in general. He laments how, somewhere in the past 35 years, social history came to be seen as the most wide-ranging and useful subfield even while intellectual history never lost its inter-subfield relevance. In European history the situation still allows for, or favors, intellectual history as a connector, but Hollinger calls this "a genuine blind spot" within the profession on the U.S. side of the ledger.
[This concludes Part II. Part III will explore Internal Issues within the hierarchy of my tripartite taxonomy, and will likely go up here on Thursday, 10/15/2009.]
Moving Beyond "Everywhere and Nowhere"
Reflections On Historically Speaking's Forum About The State Of U.S. Intellectual History
(Part II of III)
by Tim Lacy
[Recap: In Part I, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. The first post then offered my reflections and extensions on external issues. Today I will move on to the second category. - TL]
Relational Issues
Second in importance are relational issues between the external and internal categories.Relational issues bridge the difference between objective historical concerns, including intellectual history's outward thrust into the larger world, and internal professional topics. Wickberg addresses the relational category in the second-to-last paragraph of his rejoinder. Please indulge me as I relay this long but fundamental paragraph (underscores mine):
Perhaps many of us do not want to see ideas [as "in the driver's seat"], for reasons that McClay points to in his discussion of historians' fascination with historiography. Historians, like social scientists, are inclined to see the categories and ideas they use as having a life apart from the objects they are designed to understand and explain. They want to evaluate theories, categories, and methods on their functional use and intellectual adequacy rather than seeing those very categories and theories as "inside" culture, as part of the very thing being examined and explained; the old object-subject distinctions that have been repeatedly undermined over the past century are still with us. If we historicize such concepts as "class," "attitude," "gender," "assimilation," or "average"---all social scientifically derived keywords that speak to a worldview or sensibility---it makes it harder to present our students [or readers] a naturalized view of the objects such categories represent. . . .I suspect that many historians, as much as they acknowledge this condition in the abstract, in practice want their ideas to be outside of history, rather than all over it.
When I first read the opening sentences of this counterintuitive passage I thought I had read it wrong. Was Wickberg really saying that we are sometimes poor historians with regard to our own beliefs? When I began graduate school in the late 1990s, it seemed that the profession was all about you, as a developing historian, understanding your own theory of history. Theory was the thing. Of course a professional "animus" to this existed even then, as Wickberg relays in his opening piece, in the form of craft-like empiricism (p. 16). But are we now reacting to the old theory debates by participating in what Wickberg called a kind of professional anti-intellectualism, thereby ignoring the importance of intellectual history? (p. 15). And how does thinking about our own theories help relate external and internal issues in the field?
This passage is clearly challenging us to continually be aware of, and revisit, our own controlling assumptions. And it does seem that historians have to be reminded, per their graduate courses in historiography, that history applies to every historian's own philosophy about the field. Recognizing our assumptions, via intellectual history applied inwardly, is necessary for professional health and honesty. The practice of intellectual history and its fraternal twin, the history of ideas, enables historians to be more self-aware. Intellectual history helps historians examine their own metanarratives. The history of ideas presents us with another layer of contextualization that aids the historian in being more holistic and honest about the roots and boundaries of her or his discourse. All people think with and in categories. And if ideas are, or at least can function as, instruments---as John Dewey told us and Wickberg reminds us (p. 23)---it is sometimes appropriate to work backward into the ultimate ideas. This makes intellectual history relevant to the reader and the writer of history. Otherwise it is like analyzing a farm harvest by talking only about the scythe or the plow (the instrument), and ignoring a discussion of the person or the tractor (the power behind the instrument).
To provide an example from personal experience, this process of backing up demonstrated to me how questions of gender, as I understand them, moved into questions about power structure, moral values, religion, and culture. As a graduate student I enjoyed the study of gender and women's history precisely because it brought me back to larger ideas and issues in Western and world history. This is how I came to appreciate the lessons of gender history as a reader. And Wickberg's argument, with which I agree, is that this is necessary for everyone---both in the beginning and as we renew our vows to the field. It demonstrates a relation of the role of intellectual history to both external and internal issues. Showing the links to larger, older, and sometimes more attractive ideas or metanarratives, helps draw the reader into the special lessons that need to be taught about race, class, gender, emotions, etc.
Another relational issue concerns topics studied within U.S. intellectual history and their interest to both the profession and readers of history. For instance, Daniel Wickberg reminds us that a tool of intellectual history, known today as the linguistic turn, and the important "bottom up" dictum of social history, helped feed the cultural turn that displaced intellectual history from the forefront of the discipline. This displacement, partially shown to be true by course offering percentages in Hollinger's essay (p. 17), was easy because the prevailing feeling was that intellectual history concentrated on elites and elite systems of thought---topics no longer in vogue. And such narrow foci led to intellectual history's "neglect" and the growth of exciting new avenues of exploration in cultural and social history. The profession seemed to feel, collectively, that a more democratic history of ideas and thought must necessarily evolve going forward. New topics must be explored.
This was the consensus of the participants in the 1977 Wingspread Conference. As a result a democratization has, in some ways, come about. It is being done in African-American history, as Sarah Igo, Wickberg, and Hollinger all noted (p. 15, 18-19). In addition, I am aware that Caroline Merithew, Toby Higbie, and others are doing work on the thoughts and minds of the working class. I have little doubt that other subfields could put forward representative examples of new topics and topical genre blurring indicative of a democratized U.S. intellectual history.
Interdisciplinary efforts comprise another relational subcategory. Work in this realm provides intellectual history with an opportunity to connect with non-historical disciplines, thereby increasing the audience possibilities for the subfield and anchoring the subfield in academy. If intellectual history shows itself to be useful to scientists, philosophers, literary scholars, and political scientists, then the demand for professional intellectual historians will be high. Wickberg notes that the "interdisciplinary impulse...is peculiarly suited to intellectual history," and that those historians "often find themselves in dialogue with those on the margins of other disciplines," be they philosophers, political scientists, or anthropologists to name a few (p. 16). I agree with this by way of desire and my own reading list, but not so much in person; I don't meet often with philosophers, psychologists, legal scholars, and political scientiests, but I read their works.
Igo observed the same "mixing" as Wickberg, but also that the interdisciplinary movement works from the outside in. She has noticed that ideas "are growing in importance for many scholars, no matter how they categorize themselves" (p. 19). McClay and Hollinger, in addition, believe that intellectual history works best in an interdisciplinary fashion as "a meeting ground…for the dissidents within existing disciplines" (p. 21). For them, it seems, dialogue about ideas, especially marginal ones, defines intellectual history. I find much to like in this notion, and the loss of that feeling would be my only regret if U.S. intellectually history were to be mainstreamed again. Returning to the sub-theme, I fear that hitching the success of intellectual history to the academic interdisciplinary movement may just perpetuate the "everywhere and nowhere" situation so aptly summarized by McClay (p. 20).
Hollinger provides a useful segue into our third category, internal professional concerns, by pointing to intellectual history's interdisciplinary usefulness within the profession in general. He laments how, somewhere in the past 35 years, social history came to be seen as the most wide-ranging and useful subfield even while intellectual history never lost its inter-subfield relevance. In European history the situation still allows for, or favors, intellectual history as a connector, but Hollinger calls this "a genuine blind spot" within the profession on the U.S. side of the ledger.
[This concludes Part II. Part III will explore Internal Issues within the hierarchy of my tripartite taxonomy, and will likely go up here on Thursday, 10/15/2009.]
(Part II of III)
by Tim Lacy
[Recap: In Part I, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. The first post then offered my reflections and extensions on external issues. Today I will move on to the second category. - TL]
Relational Issues
Second in importance are relational issues between the external and internal categories.
Relational issues bridge the difference between objective historical concerns, including intellectual history's outward thrust into the larger world, and internal professional topics. Wickberg addresses the relational category in the second-to-last paragraph of his rejoinder. Please indulge me as I relay this long but fundamental paragraph (underscores mine):Perhaps many of us do not want to see ideas [as "in the driver's seat"], for reasons that McClay points to in his discussion of historians' fascination with historiography. Historians, like social scientists, are inclined to see the categories and ideas they use as having a life apart from the objects they are designed to understand and explain. They want to evaluate theories, categories, and methods on their functional use and intellectual adequacy rather than seeing those very categories and theories as "inside" culture, as part of the very thing being examined and explained; the old object-subject distinctions that have been repeatedly undermined over the past century are still with us. If we historicize such concepts as "class," "attitude," "gender," "assimilation," or "average"---all social scientifically derived keywords that speak to a worldview or sensibility---it makes it harder to present our students [or readers] a naturalized view of the objects such categories represent. . . .I suspect that many historians, as much as they acknowledge this condition in the abstract, in practice want their ideas to be outside of history, rather than all over it.
When I first read the opening sentences of this counterintuitive passage I thought I had read it wrong. Was Wickberg really saying that we are sometimes poor historians with regard to our own beliefs? When I began graduate school in the late 1990s, it seemed that the profession was all about you, as a developing historian, understanding your own theory of history. Theory was the thing. Of course a professional "animus" to this existed even then, as Wickberg relays in his opening piece, in the form of craft-like empiricism (p. 16). But are we now reacting to the old theory debates by participating in what Wickberg called a kind of professional anti-intellectualism, thereby ignoring the importance of intellectual history? (p. 15). And how does thinking about our own theories help relate external and internal issues in the field?
This passage is clearly challenging us to continually be aware of, and revisit, our own controlling assumptions. And it does seem that historians have to be reminded, per their graduate courses in historiography, that history applies to every historian's own philosophy about the field. Recognizing our assumptions, via intellectual history applied inwardly, is necessary for professional health and honesty. The practice of intellectual history and its fraternal twin, the history of ideas, enables historians to be more self-aware. Intellectual history helps historians examine their own metanarratives. The history of ideas presents us with another layer of contextualization that aids the historian in being more holistic and honest about the roots and boundaries of her or his discourse. All people think with and in categories. And if ideas are, or at least can function as, instruments---as John Dewey told us and Wickberg reminds us (p. 23)---it is sometimes appropriate to work backward into the ultimate ideas. This makes intellectual history relevant to the reader and the writer of history. Otherwise it is like analyzing a farm harvest by talking only about the scythe or the plow (the instrument), and ignoring a discussion of the person or the tractor (the power behind the instrument).
To provide an example from personal experience, this process of backing up demonstrated to me how questions of gender, as I understand them, moved into questions about power structure, moral values, religion, and culture. As a graduate student I enjoyed the study of gender and women's history precisely because it brought me back to larger ideas and issues in Western and world history. This is how I came to appreciate the lessons of gender history as a reader. And Wickberg's argument, with which I agree, is that this is necessary for everyone---both in the beginning and as we renew our vows to the field. It demonstrates a relation of the role of intellectual history to both external and internal issues. Showing the links to larger, older, and sometimes more attractive ideas or metanarratives, helps draw the reader into the special lessons that need to be taught about race, class, gender, emotions, etc.
Another relational issue concerns topics studied within U.S. intellectual history and their interest to both the profession and readers of history. For instance, Daniel Wickberg reminds us that a tool of intellectual history, known today as the linguistic turn, and the important "bottom up" dictum of social history, helped feed the cultural turn that displaced intellectual history from the forefront of the discipline. This displacement, partially shown to be true by course offering percentages in Hollinger's essay (p. 17), was easy because the prevailing feeling was that intellectual history concentrated on elites and elite systems of thought---topics no longer in vogue. And such narrow foci led to intellectual history's "neglect" and the growth of exciting new avenues of exploration in cultural and social history. The profession seemed to feel, collectively, that a more democratic history of ideas and thought must necessarily evolve going forward. New topics must be explored.
This was the consensus of the participants in the 1977 Wingspread Conference. As a result a democratization has, in some ways, come about. It is being done in African-American history, as Sarah Igo, Wickberg, and Hollinger all noted (p. 15, 18-19). In addition, I am aware that Caroline Merithew, Toby Higbie, and others are doing work on the thoughts and minds of the working class. I have little doubt that other subfields could put forward representative examples of new topics and topical genre blurring indicative of a democratized U.S. intellectual history.
Interdisciplinary efforts comprise another relational subcategory. Work in this realm provides intellectual history with an opportunity to connect with non-historical disciplines, thereby increasing the audience possibilities for the subfield and anchoring the subfield in academy. If intellectual history shows itself to be useful to scientists, philosophers, literary scholars, and political scientists, then the demand for professional intellectual historians will be high. Wickberg notes that the "interdisciplinary impulse...is peculiarly suited to intellectual history," and that those historians "often find themselves in dialogue with those on the margins of other disciplines," be they philosophers, political scientists, or anthropologists to name a few (p. 16). I agree with this by way of desire and my own reading list, but not so much in person; I don't meet often with philosophers, psychologists, legal scholars, and political scientiests, but I read their works.
Igo observed the same "mixing" as Wickberg, but also that the interdisciplinary movement works from the outside in. She has noticed that ideas "are growing in importance for many scholars, no matter how they categorize themselves" (p. 19). McClay and Hollinger, in addition, believe that intellectual history works best in an interdisciplinary fashion as "a meeting ground…for the dissidents within existing disciplines" (p. 21). For them, it seems, dialogue about ideas, especially marginal ones, defines intellectual history. I find much to like in this notion, and the loss of that feeling would be my only regret if U.S. intellectually history were to be mainstreamed again. Returning to the sub-theme, I fear that hitching the success of intellectual history to the academic interdisciplinary movement may just perpetuate the "everywhere and nowhere" situation so aptly summarized by McClay (p. 20).
Hollinger provides a useful segue into our third category, internal professional concerns, by pointing to intellectual history's interdisciplinary usefulness within the profession in general. He laments how, somewhere in the past 35 years, social history came to be seen as the most wide-ranging and useful subfield even while intellectual history never lost its inter-subfield relevance. In European history the situation still allows for, or favors, intellectual history as a connector, but Hollinger calls this "a genuine blind spot" within the profession on the U.S. side of the ledger.
[This concludes Part II. Part III will explore Internal Issues within the hierarchy of my tripartite taxonomy, and will likely go up here on Thursday, 10/15/2009.]
Jumat, 09 Oktober 2009
CFP Of Interest: Special Liberal Arts Issue Of Philosophy in the Contemporary World
I noticed this CFP a few weeks back and meant to transfer it here sooner. I've highlighted some parts of interest below. It appears that historians are welcome as authors. It might pay, however, to run your idea by guest editor Peter J. Mehl, e-mail address below. - TL
--------------------------------------------
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Philosophy in the Contemporary World
Topic: The Future of Liberal Arts Education
The future of liberal arts education is a highly contested matter. Some argue that the liberal arts are more important than ever, while others say that they will soon fade away. Many argue that a liberal arts education must be reformed; others say that it retains its intrinsic value despite calls for more relevance for professional careers. This issue of the journal, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, intends to focus philosophical clarity and creativity on this broad topic.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible topics:
Liberal arts education and professional education
How do we assess liberal arts education?
Philosophy’s role in liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and the meaning of life
What are the liberal arts?
Liberal arts education and the natural sciences
Intrinsic vs. instrumental value of liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and accreditation
Liberal arts education and on-line education
Uses of a liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and the culture wars
What can history tell us about the future of liberal arts education?
Liberal arts education in a pluralistic world
Liberal arts education and consumer culture
Liberal arts education and technology
Deadline of submission: 30 April 2010
Submissions and queries: Guest Editor: Peter J. Mehl, Professor of Philosophy & Religion, Associate Dean of Liberal Arts, University of Central Arkansas
Electronic submissions are required. Send manuscripts as email attachment (in Word or rtf format) to the Editor at: peterm-at-uca.edu
Preparation of Manuscripts: Manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous review and should be accompanied by a short abstract. Manuscripts should be double-spaced, with endnotes and a list of works
cited following the text. Word count should be 3,000-5,000 words. Explanatory notes should be used sparingly; citations should be made in parentheses (author date). On matters of style and documentation
consult Chicago Manual of Style and recent issues of the journal.
For further information about the journal, contact the Editor, Andrew Fiala: afiala-at-csufresno.edu
Journal website here.
--------------------------------------------
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Philosophy in the Contemporary World
Topic: The Future of Liberal Arts Education
The future of liberal arts education is a highly contested matter. Some argue that the liberal arts are more important than ever, while others say that they will soon fade away. Many argue that a liberal arts education must be reformed; others say that it retains its intrinsic value despite calls for more relevance for professional careers. This issue of the journal, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, intends to focus philosophical clarity and creativity on this broad topic.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible topics:
Liberal arts education and professional education
How do we assess liberal arts education?
Philosophy’s role in liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and the meaning of life
What are the liberal arts?
Liberal arts education and the natural sciences
Intrinsic vs. instrumental value of liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and accreditation
Liberal arts education and on-line education
Uses of a liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and the culture wars
What can history tell us about the future of liberal arts education?
Liberal arts education in a pluralistic world
Liberal arts education and consumer culture
Liberal arts education and technology
Deadline of submission: 30 April 2010
Submissions and queries: Guest Editor: Peter J. Mehl, Professor of Philosophy & Religion, Associate Dean of Liberal Arts, University of Central Arkansas
Electronic submissions are required. Send manuscripts as email attachment (in Word or rtf format) to the Editor at: peterm-at-uca.edu
Preparation of Manuscripts: Manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous review and should be accompanied by a short abstract. Manuscripts should be double-spaced, with endnotes and a list of works
cited following the text. Word count should be 3,000-5,000 words. Explanatory notes should be used sparingly; citations should be made in parentheses (author date). On matters of style and documentation
consult Chicago Manual of Style and recent issues of the journal.
For further information about the journal, contact the Editor, Andrew Fiala: afiala-at-csufresno.edu
Journal website here.
CFP Of Interest: Special Liberal Arts Issue Of Philosophy in the Contemporary World
I noticed this CFP a few weeks back and meant to transfer it here sooner. I've highlighted some parts of interest below. It appears that historians are welcome as authors. It might pay, however, to run your idea by guest editor Peter J. Mehl, e-mail address below. - TL
--------------------------------------------
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Philosophy in the Contemporary World
Topic: The Future of Liberal Arts Education
The future of liberal arts education is a highly contested matter. Some argue that the liberal arts are more important than ever, while others say that they will soon fade away. Many argue that a liberal arts education must be reformed; others say that it retains its intrinsic value despite calls for more relevance for professional careers. This issue of the journal, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, intends to focus philosophical clarity and creativity on this broad topic.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible topics:
Liberal arts education and professional education
How do we assess liberal arts education?
Philosophy’s role in liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and the meaning of life
What are the liberal arts?
Liberal arts education and the natural sciences
Intrinsic vs. instrumental value of liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and accreditation
Liberal arts education and on-line education
Uses of a liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and the culture wars
What can history tell us about the future of liberal arts education?
Liberal arts education in a pluralistic world
Liberal arts education and consumer culture
Liberal arts education and technology
Deadline of submission: 30 April 2010
Submissions and queries: Guest Editor: Peter J. Mehl, Professor of Philosophy & Religion, Associate Dean of Liberal Arts, University of Central Arkansas
Electronic submissions are required. Send manuscripts as email attachment (in Word or rtf format) to the Editor at: peterm-at-uca.edu
Preparation of Manuscripts: Manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous review and should be accompanied by a short abstract. Manuscripts should be double-spaced, with endnotes and a list of works
cited following the text. Word count should be 3,000-5,000 words. Explanatory notes should be used sparingly; citations should be made in parentheses (author date). On matters of style and documentation
consult Chicago Manual of Style and recent issues of the journal.
For further information about the journal, contact the Editor, Andrew Fiala: afiala-at-csufresno.edu
Journal website here.
--------------------------------------------
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Philosophy in the Contemporary World
Topic: The Future of Liberal Arts Education
The future of liberal arts education is a highly contested matter. Some argue that the liberal arts are more important than ever, while others say that they will soon fade away. Many argue that a liberal arts education must be reformed; others say that it retains its intrinsic value despite calls for more relevance for professional careers. This issue of the journal, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, intends to focus philosophical clarity and creativity on this broad topic.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible topics:
Liberal arts education and professional education
How do we assess liberal arts education?
Philosophy’s role in liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and the meaning of life
What are the liberal arts?
Liberal arts education and the natural sciences
Intrinsic vs. instrumental value of liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and accreditation
Liberal arts education and on-line education
Uses of a liberal arts education
Liberal arts education and the culture wars
What can history tell us about the future of liberal arts education?
Liberal arts education in a pluralistic world
Liberal arts education and consumer culture
Liberal arts education and technology
Deadline of submission: 30 April 2010
Submissions and queries: Guest Editor: Peter J. Mehl, Professor of Philosophy & Religion, Associate Dean of Liberal Arts, University of Central Arkansas
Electronic submissions are required. Send manuscripts as email attachment (in Word or rtf format) to the Editor at: peterm-at-uca.edu
Preparation of Manuscripts: Manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous review and should be accompanied by a short abstract. Manuscripts should be double-spaced, with endnotes and a list of works
cited following the text. Word count should be 3,000-5,000 words. Explanatory notes should be used sparingly; citations should be made in parentheses (author date). On matters of style and documentation
consult Chicago Manual of Style and recent issues of the journal.
For further information about the journal, contact the Editor, Andrew Fiala: afiala-at-csufresno.edu
Journal website here.
Rabu, 07 Oktober 2009
Moving Beyond "Everywhere and Nowhere"
Reflections On Historically Speaking's Forum About The State Of U.S. Intellectual History
(Part I of III)
by Tim Lacy
I first received word of Historically Speaking's forum in August. The prospect excited me both for its topic (of course) and the participants: Daniel Wickberg, David A. Hollinger, Sarah E. Igo, and Wilfred M. McClay. It is not every day that advanced and senior historians in intellectual history choose to wrap their minds around this peculiar subfield, whether assessing the United States variety or otherwise. I am grateful for each contributor's effort, and that Historically Speaking took on the topic.
The forum did not disappoint. The contributions touched on a great many issues for the U.S. branch of intellectual history. Apart from simple topical relevance, every essay held persuasive points. Indeed, Wickberg noted in his final rejoinder that one can "scarcely address all the issues that were discussed" (p. 22). My colleague Paul Murphy called the forum "engrossing." As such, I believe the endeavor already qualifies as required reading for all graduate students and working professionals in U.S. intellectual history. Just the books and articles cited in each forum essay should be on required reading lists across American graduate programs.
So many of the books listed in Wickberg, Hollinger, and Igo's essays have been published since 2001 that few to none were on my own doctoral exam reading lists. And my lists were constructed late in 2002 for an early 2003 major field exam. It is clear that there has been a kind of disguised explosion of books related to U.S. intellectual history within the last decade, or even just the last 7-8 years. I'm ashamed to confess my ignorance of the event. In my defense, the apparent explosion occurred during my dissertation writing period and in the hustle of job hunting shortly thereafter. Perhaps a backlog of more explicit intellectual history topics had developed since the cultural turn of the 1970s, and this paradoxically quiet boom is the result? Then again, since I have not read all of these books, maybe it is an issue of "foregrounding," per Wickberg's rejoinder (p. 23), in that these books have been advertised and sold, rightly or wrongly, as cultural histories due to professional trends? Hollinger also alludes to the problem of classification in his essay (p. 17). I would have to examine each book's Library of Congress assignments to know for sure.
In any event, I found this sudden awareness of the boom in our subfield's literature both exhilarating and intimidating. I knew about some the books beforehand, but at least 50 percent were off my radar---hence my surprise. It is a feeling analogous to having bought a large box of stuff at an auction, or rummage sale, based on what you saw on top, only to find when you got home that there were surprising number of new items at the bottom, some of which quite valuable. Of course this is an incomplete, and perhaps too negative, analogy at best.
After getting over these initial reactions and into the substance of the essays, the more reflective part of me came to see three categories of issues raised in each. I divided these into the external, the internal, and the relational. By external I mean issues that are outward facing and objectively historical from a professional point of view. They point toward other historical subfields and the public in general. By internal I refer to professional structural issues. And by relational I aim at those issues that bridge, or mediate, both the external and internal. Of course this merely a useful trope; my categories do not apply always and everywhere within the subfield. And none of the four forum authors address these categories as I construct them. Lastly, I will hazard a hierarchy of my tripartite taxonomy. Although the subtopics are interlinked across my categories, some are more important than others. I've grouped them accordingly.
External Issues
First in importance are topics related to pure history, or history as a subject of study and object of knowledge. These considerations include methodology, topics for research and writing, and teaching. Each has a great deal to do with how the subfield presents externally, such as:
- The question of broad metanarratives inherent in the history of ideas, versus the role of ideas in more integrated, chronologically narrow circumstances (an old but still unresolved debate, with regard to usefulness);
- The role of intellectual history in integrative, cross-disciplinary endeavors;
- The problem of integrating intellectual history topics into survey courses;
- Choosing and using primary resources;
- Audience concerns; and
- The asking and answering of substantive, broadly applicable questions.
All of these nuts and bolts considerations can be characterized as topics with primarily external implications---important beyond the profession but also dictating the usefulness of intellectual history to the profession. These issues should be of utmost importance to every self-identifying intellectual historian. All meaning and identity with regard to the subfield flow from these fundamental issues.
All forum contributors touched on aspects, either singly or in combination, of pure history in relation to the subfield. Methodological and topical relationships within the subfield are addressed by Igo, Wickberg, and Wilfred McClay.
Igo sees methodology as trending toward "a topic or question rather than a particular school of interpretation" (p. 19). She may be right that junior and younger historians prefer eclecticism, or even agnosticism, rather than limiting themselves by identifying with a particular school of linguistic or cultural theory. For methodology is a tool, not a subdiscipline. Even so, McClay and Wickberg point to peculiarities in approach and interests if not methodology. Wickberg forwards that the self-reflectivity inherent in historiography, including the search for systematic thought, lends itself to those who enjoy intellectual history (p. 15-16). He also notes that digital revolution lends itself to the "systematic tracing of ideas through multiple texts" (p. 16). My own experience in searching for the roots of the great books idea confirms Wickberg's sense of the convenience of digital records.
McClay continued on peculiar topical and methodological relationships. For instance, because of the complexity of some thinkers and groups of intellectuals, he observed:
Left to its own subdisciplinary devices, [intellectual history] tends toward the esoteric and toward the invention of neologisms and arcane vocabularies that make distinctions and discriminations that are not available in ordinary language (p. 21).
I agree in that dealing with philosophers and complex thinking, intellectual historians must explain, at the very least, the relevance of neologisms, devices, and arcane vocabularies used in their primary resources. And Wickberg points to this problem in his opening and closing essays (p. 15, 23) when he speaks of studying "formal, developed systems of thought" as well as "foreground[ing] ideas, thinking, and the ways in which minds structure experience." The burden of intellectuals historians, insofar as they hope to write beyond those interested in the history of philosophy, is to avoid the trap outlined by McClay and relate systems and ideas to both the age in which the thinker, or thinkers, lived, and to the present.
This points us to audience considerations. The ability to pique the interest of their contemporaries is what made Christopher Lasch, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Richard Hofstadter successful intellectual historians and public intellectuals. As professed intellectual historians they proved, in the marketplace, the relevance of the history of ideas. For whom are we writing? If too much of the burden of interpretation is on the reader, or if the topic feels only relevant to past actors (i.e. antiquarian), then only a few other intellectual historians and philosophers will buy the book. If the writer takes on the burden of simplification, then I believe that both the educated public and fellow historians will buy the book. Of course I'm not advocating for top-down applications weighted in favor of famous intellectuals---characteristics of the older, failed school of intellectual history. Nor am I pushing for a return to narratives that falsely pretend to be "a proxy for the study of all Americans," to borrow Hollinger's apt phrase (p. 17). Rather, I assert that a balance exists where an idea can be explained in full historically, in terms of foundations and the range of applicability, but also linked ahead by tracing variations. And this is something you might think that publishers could get behind.
I do not mean to imply that every intellectual history should end in the present. And perhaps the new books noted by Wickberg, Hollinger, and Igo do the work of connecting forward in some fashion. I do mean, in any case, that some attempt should be made by the author to relate forward the discrete period under consideration. Igo did it in her 2007 book, The Averaged American. Menand famously did it in The Metaphysical Club. Both worked, consciously or not, in the tradition of one of intellectual history's founders, James Harvey Robinson, who advocated for usefulness in 1910s. Robinson might have taken things too far, but he decisively relayed the imperative:
Our books are like very bad memories which insist upon recalling facts that have no assignable relation to our needs, and this is the reason why the practical value of history has so long been obscured. ...The present has hitherto been the willing victim of the past; the time has now come when it should turn on the past and exploit it in the interests of advance" (Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 98).
There can be little doubt that Robinson was not going to overly burden his readers with the arcane. Some intellectual historians, by virtue of their names and seniority (e.g. Mark Noll, the Genoveses, Hollinger), their perennially favored topics (e.g. the Civil War, presidential biographies), and their topical timeliness (e.g. late twentieth-century conservatism, economic collapse) will not suffer for intentionally underplaying relevance. Everyone else, however, must strain to lessen the obscurity of their intellectuals or ideas. It must become a part of intellectual history's "shared sense of craftsmanship," per Igo's apt citation of Michèle Lamont's 2009 study (forum, p. 19).
In addition to forum contributors' concerns about the study of history---of external matters per my classification scheme---there are other noteworthy considerations in the new subfields of transnational history and the history of emotions. Both categories present novel works that challenge the boundaries of traditional intellectual history and potentially expand the audience of readers of U.S. intellectual history. Hollinger noted that a productive kind of genre blurring has occurred between intellectual history, the history of learning, and the history of science "during the last generation." This is a result of new categories of exploration such as work on social scientists and "the public role of natural scientists"---or scientists as public intellectuals (p. 18). I would assert that the same thing is happening in the other two categories that I mentioned.
Transnational history results in a great deal of genre blurring that helps make intellectual history attractive to the general public. Although not a perfect example, writing-wise, of balancing historical nuance with today's concerns, Jay Corrin's 2002 transnational study, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame Press), shows some of the topical promise of transnational history. His study moves beyond the English-speaking Catholic intellectuals to study the idea of Democracy in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy during the 1850-1940 period. Corrin remains within the boundaries of traditional intellectual history due to a focus on primarily on elite, prominent thinkers (e.g. G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, papal encyclicals, Jacques Maritain). But he does, however, make a point of broadening that base to include previously ignored figures, fringe thinkers, and ideologues (e.g. Rev. Charles Coughlin, Dorothy Day, Rev. H.A. Reinhold, Peter Maurin). And Corrin's very relevant concern for political and economic democracy saves his study from the hint of obscurity. Although I loved the book, I wished that he would've spent an epilogue, or part of one at least, relating his study forward. I felt he could have tagged a number of present-day problems for Catholics in democracies (single-issue voting, social justice, economic inequality, subsidiarity, etc.). In sum, Corrin's study points to the promise of his genre for U.S. intellectual history.
Genre blurring with intellectual history also occurs in another developing subfield: the history of emotions. My recent reading of Nicole Eustace's 2008 book, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (North Carolina Press), brought home the possibilities for me. Eustace writes of emotion as a tool for affirming and building democratic culture. She argued that emotion provided an avenue for equality to speed past exclusivity. If access to learning, and hence reason, was limited (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), then emotion provided the means for developing what Eustace called "thumos"---a mix of passion and classical virtue (p. 377-88 of her text). Of course historians can cite counter-examples of how emotions have been used negatively by twentieth-century demagogues and ideologues. Even so, others will cite more positive uses by heart-tugging progressives. Eustace and her colleagues in the history of emotions, then, provide us with a tool for examining how the anti-reason category of anti-intellectualism might be used for the good of America. As such, history of emotions provides a means by which intellectual history can be presented from another angle---the back door, if you will.
Moving on to another point with external implications, each forum contributor addressed teaching, whether by thinking through the U.S. history survey in terms of intellectual history or by noting course offerings. Since surveys are the way that most college students---and a significant portion of the public by default---encounter U.S. history, they are a fundamental external concern. It's a place for presenting the relevancy of intellectual history to those who might not encounter it otherwise. The essays address the survey in two ways: by topics covered and by the structure of the course. Wickberg's opening piece addresses the neglect or optional nature of topics that are central to intellectual history---e.g. Pragmatism, Dewey, rise of the university, influence of Scottish philosophy, etc. (p. 15). Since surveys rarely come with precise sub-topic mandates from administration, in my experience at least, this shifts the burden onto the intellectual historian. She or he must decide to integrate what they think is important and then translate the high rhetoric, when necessary, for the students---or intentionally present something over their heads and challenge them to reach up (helping them later with a mid-term/final review). Fear of student incapability should not dictate the initial plan. After that we have to rely somewhat on the popularity of our approach among students to show the attractiveness of intellectual history to fellow teachers and administrators.
Three of the four forum contributors support the notion that the history of ideas is as good a connecting thread as any in a survey situation. And this constitutes a nice transitional point to what I have termed "relational issues"---the next topic in my taxonomy. Igo, Wickberg, and McClay make arguments for the history of ideas as being the best common thread in a wide-ranging survey course. Igo wrote that "a capacious history of ideas...can and ought to be central to the survey" (p. 19-20). McClay notes that surveys are "a great act of triage" (I agree) that requires some affinity for a metanarrative that is "honest, coherent, and reasonably complete" (p. 21). Intellectual history helps McClay in this effort. The question then becomes whether we can have substantive metanarratives while avoiding the older, much-abused (rightly) trap of "grand narratives"? (p. 16).
Wickberg, in his final rejoinder, argues aggressively that a history-of-ideas approach is the answer for showing intellectual history's importance in a survey setting. That approach both allows for topical flexibility and reinforces the notion that intellectuals and great thinkers are important for understanding the ebb and flow of U.S. history. Wickberg wants us to "see ideas themselves in the driver's seat," not just people (to avoid the elite trap) or topics, as I see it, such as politics or class or gender or race (p. 24). He also desires us to "foreground ideas" in general and understand "ideas as a force in history" (p. 22-23). By doing these things, I would say that all historians will run much less risk of parochializing history in terms of particular ideas. By foregrounding ideas we will give those on the outside a greater sense of what some mid-century thinkers called "the great conversation" about the "great ideas." We will make history more about the liberal arts and social sciences, and less about antiquarianism or a narrow political-ideological agenda. By thinking of ideas as a "force in history," intellectual historians can help forward the interdisciplinary cause and make the subfield popular among non-professional audiences.
[This concludes Part I. Part II will explore Relational Issues within the hierarchy of my tripartite taxonomy, and will likely go up here on Monday, 10/12/2009.]
(Part I of III)
by Tim Lacy
I first received word of Historically Speaking's forum in August. The prospect excited me both for its topic (of course) and the participants: Daniel Wickberg, David A. Hollinger, Sarah E. Igo, and Wilfred M. McClay. It is not every day that advanced and senior historians in intellectual history choose to wrap their minds around this peculiar subfield, whether assessing the United States variety or otherwise. I am grateful for each contributor's effort, and that Historically Speaking took on the topic.
The forum did not disappoint. The contributions touched on a great many issues for the U.S. branch of intellectual history. Apart from simple topical relevance, every essay held persuasive points. Indeed, Wickberg noted in his final rejoinder that one can "scarcely address all the issues that were discussed" (p. 22). My colleague Paul Murphy called the forum "engrossing." As such, I believe the endeavor already qualifies as required reading for all graduate students and working professionals in U.S. intellectual history. Just the books and articles cited in each forum essay should be on required reading lists across American graduate programs. So many of the books listed in Wickberg, Hollinger, and Igo's essays have been published since 2001 that few to none were on my own doctoral exam reading lists. And my lists were constructed late in 2002 for an early 2003 major field exam. It is clear that there has been a kind of disguised explosion of books related to U.S. intellectual history within the last decade, or even just the last 7-8 years. I'm ashamed to confess my ignorance of the event. In my defense, the apparent explosion occurred during my dissertation writing period and in the hustle of job hunting shortly thereafter. Perhaps a backlog of more explicit intellectual history topics had developed since the cultural turn of the 1970s, and this paradoxically quiet boom is the result? Then again, since I have not read all of these books, maybe it is an issue of "foregrounding," per Wickberg's rejoinder (p. 23), in that these books have been advertised and sold, rightly or wrongly, as cultural histories due to professional trends? Hollinger also alludes to the problem of classification in his essay (p. 17). I would have to examine each book's Library of Congress assignments to know for sure.
In any event, I found this sudden awareness of the boom in our subfield's literature both exhilarating and intimidating. I knew about some the books beforehand, but at least 50 percent were off my radar---hence my surprise. It is a feeling analogous to having bought a large box of stuff at an auction, or rummage sale, based on what you saw on top, only to find when you got home that there were surprising number of new items at the bottom, some of which quite valuable. Of course this is an incomplete, and perhaps too negative, analogy at best.
After getting over these initial reactions and into the substance of the essays, the more reflective part of me came to see three categories of issues raised in each. I divided these into the external, the internal, and the relational. By external I mean issues that are outward facing and objectively historical from a professional point of view. They point toward other historical subfields and the public in general. By internal I refer to professional structural issues. And by relational I aim at those issues that bridge, or mediate, both the external and internal. Of course this merely a useful trope; my categories do not apply always and everywhere within the subfield. And none of the four forum authors address these categories as I construct them. Lastly, I will hazard a hierarchy of my tripartite taxonomy. Although the subtopics are interlinked across my categories, some are more important than others. I've grouped them accordingly.
External Issues
First in importance are topics related to pure history, or history as a subject of study and object of knowledge. These considerations include methodology, topics for research and writing, and teaching. Each has a great deal to do with how the subfield presents externally, such as:
- The question of broad metanarratives inherent in the history of ideas, versus the role of ideas in more integrated, chronologically narrow circumstances (an old but still unresolved debate, with regard to usefulness);
- The role of intellectual history in integrative, cross-disciplinary endeavors;
- The problem of integrating intellectual history topics into survey courses;
- Choosing and using primary resources;
- Audience concerns; and
- The asking and answering of substantive, broadly applicable questions.
All of these nuts and bolts considerations can be characterized as topics with primarily external implications---important beyond the profession but also dictating the usefulness of intellectual history to the profession. These issues should be of utmost importance to every self-identifying intellectual historian. All meaning and identity with regard to the subfield flow from these fundamental issues.
All forum contributors touched on aspects, either singly or in combination, of pure history in relation to the subfield. Methodological and topical relationships within the subfield are addressed by Igo, Wickberg, and Wilfred McClay.
Igo sees methodology as trending toward "a topic or question rather than a particular school of interpretation" (p. 19). She may be right that junior and younger historians prefer eclecticism, or even agnosticism, rather than limiting themselves by identifying with a particular school of linguistic or cultural theory. For methodology is a tool, not a subdiscipline. Even so, McClay and Wickberg point to peculiarities in approach and interests if not methodology. Wickberg forwards that the self-reflectivity inherent in historiography, including the search for systematic thought, lends itself to those who enjoy intellectual history (p. 15-16). He also notes that digital revolution lends itself to the "systematic tracing of ideas through multiple texts" (p. 16). My own experience in searching for the roots of the great books idea confirms Wickberg's sense of the convenience of digital records.
McClay continued on peculiar topical and methodological relationships. For instance, because of the complexity of some thinkers and groups of intellectuals, he observed:
Left to its own subdisciplinary devices, [intellectual history] tends toward the esoteric and toward the invention of neologisms and arcane vocabularies that make distinctions and discriminations that are not available in ordinary language (p. 21).
I agree in that dealing with philosophers and complex thinking, intellectual historians must explain, at the very least, the relevance of neologisms, devices, and arcane vocabularies used in their primary resources. And Wickberg points to this problem in his opening and closing essays (p. 15, 23) when he speaks of studying "formal, developed systems of thought" as well as "foreground[ing] ideas, thinking, and the ways in which minds structure experience." The burden of intellectuals historians, insofar as they hope to write beyond those interested in the history of philosophy, is to avoid the trap outlined by McClay and relate systems and ideas to both the age in which the thinker, or thinkers, lived, and to the present.
This points us to audience considerations. The ability to pique the interest of their contemporaries is what made Christopher Lasch, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Richard Hofstadter successful intellectual historians and public intellectuals. As professed intellectual historians they proved, in the marketplace, the relevance of the history of ideas. For whom are we writing? If too much of the burden of interpretation is on the reader, or if the topic feels only relevant to past actors (i.e. antiquarian), then only a few other intellectual historians and philosophers will buy the book. If the writer takes on the burden of simplification, then I believe that both the educated public and fellow historians will buy the book. Of course I'm not advocating for top-down applications weighted in favor of famous intellectuals---characteristics of the older, failed school of intellectual history. Nor am I pushing for a return to narratives that falsely pretend to be "a proxy for the study of all Americans," to borrow Hollinger's apt phrase (p. 17). Rather, I assert that a balance exists where an idea can be explained in full historically, in terms of foundations and the range of applicability, but also linked ahead by tracing variations. And this is something you might think that publishers could get behind.
I do not mean to imply that every intellectual history should end in the present. And perhaps the new books noted by Wickberg, Hollinger, and Igo do the work of connecting forward in some fashion. I do mean, in any case, that some attempt should be made by the author to relate forward the discrete period under consideration. Igo did it in her 2007 book, The Averaged American. Menand famously did it in The Metaphysical Club. Both worked, consciously or not, in the tradition of one of intellectual history's founders, James Harvey Robinson, who advocated for usefulness in 1910s. Robinson might have taken things too far, but he decisively relayed the imperative:
Our books are like very bad memories which insist upon recalling facts that have no assignable relation to our needs, and this is the reason why the practical value of history has so long been obscured. ...The present has hitherto been the willing victim of the past; the time has now come when it should turn on the past and exploit it in the interests of advance" (Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 98).
There can be little doubt that Robinson was not going to overly burden his readers with the arcane. Some intellectual historians, by virtue of their names and seniority (e.g. Mark Noll, the Genoveses, Hollinger), their perennially favored topics (e.g. the Civil War, presidential biographies), and their topical timeliness (e.g. late twentieth-century conservatism, economic collapse) will not suffer for intentionally underplaying relevance. Everyone else, however, must strain to lessen the obscurity of their intellectuals or ideas. It must become a part of intellectual history's "shared sense of craftsmanship," per Igo's apt citation of Michèle Lamont's 2009 study (forum, p. 19).
In addition to forum contributors' concerns about the study of history---of external matters per my classification scheme---there are other noteworthy considerations in the new subfields of transnational history and the history of emotions. Both categories present novel works that challenge the boundaries of traditional intellectual history and potentially expand the audience of readers of U.S. intellectual history. Hollinger noted that a productive kind of genre blurring has occurred between intellectual history, the history of learning, and the history of science "during the last generation." This is a result of new categories of exploration such as work on social scientists and "the public role of natural scientists"---or scientists as public intellectuals (p. 18). I would assert that the same thing is happening in the other two categories that I mentioned.
Transnational history results in a great deal of genre blurring that helps make intellectual history attractive to the general public. Although not a perfect example, writing-wise, of balancing historical nuance with today's concerns, Jay Corrin's 2002 transnational study, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame Press), shows some of the topical promise of transnational history. His study moves beyond the English-speaking Catholic intellectuals to study the idea of Democracy in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy during the 1850-1940 period. Corrin remains within the boundaries of traditional intellectual history due to a focus on primarily on elite, prominent thinkers (e.g. G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, papal encyclicals, Jacques Maritain). But he does, however, make a point of broadening that base to include previously ignored figures, fringe thinkers, and ideologues (e.g. Rev. Charles Coughlin, Dorothy Day, Rev. H.A. Reinhold, Peter Maurin). And Corrin's very relevant concern for political and economic democracy saves his study from the hint of obscurity. Although I loved the book, I wished that he would've spent an epilogue, or part of one at least, relating his study forward. I felt he could have tagged a number of present-day problems for Catholics in democracies (single-issue voting, social justice, economic inequality, subsidiarity, etc.). In sum, Corrin's study points to the promise of his genre for U.S. intellectual history.
Genre blurring with intellectual history also occurs in another developing subfield: the history of emotions. My recent reading of Nicole Eustace's 2008 book, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (North Carolina Press), brought home the possibilities for me. Eustace writes of emotion as a tool for affirming and building democratic culture. She argued that emotion provided an avenue for equality to speed past exclusivity. If access to learning, and hence reason, was limited (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), then emotion provided the means for developing what Eustace called "thumos"---a mix of passion and classical virtue (p. 377-88 of her text). Of course historians can cite counter-examples of how emotions have been used negatively by twentieth-century demagogues and ideologues. Even so, others will cite more positive uses by heart-tugging progressives. Eustace and her colleagues in the history of emotions, then, provide us with a tool for examining how the anti-reason category of anti-intellectualism might be used for the good of America. As such, history of emotions provides a means by which intellectual history can be presented from another angle---the back door, if you will.
Moving on to another point with external implications, each forum contributor addressed teaching, whether by thinking through the U.S. history survey in terms of intellectual history or by noting course offerings. Since surveys are the way that most college students---and a significant portion of the public by default---encounter U.S. history, they are a fundamental external concern. It's a place for presenting the relevancy of intellectual history to those who might not encounter it otherwise. The essays address the survey in two ways: by topics covered and by the structure of the course. Wickberg's opening piece addresses the neglect or optional nature of topics that are central to intellectual history---e.g. Pragmatism, Dewey, rise of the university, influence of Scottish philosophy, etc. (p. 15). Since surveys rarely come with precise sub-topic mandates from administration, in my experience at least, this shifts the burden onto the intellectual historian. She or he must decide to integrate what they think is important and then translate the high rhetoric, when necessary, for the students---or intentionally present something over their heads and challenge them to reach up (helping them later with a mid-term/final review). Fear of student incapability should not dictate the initial plan. After that we have to rely somewhat on the popularity of our approach among students to show the attractiveness of intellectual history to fellow teachers and administrators.
Three of the four forum contributors support the notion that the history of ideas is as good a connecting thread as any in a survey situation. And this constitutes a nice transitional point to what I have termed "relational issues"---the next topic in my taxonomy. Igo, Wickberg, and McClay make arguments for the history of ideas as being the best common thread in a wide-ranging survey course. Igo wrote that "a capacious history of ideas...can and ought to be central to the survey" (p. 19-20). McClay notes that surveys are "a great act of triage" (I agree) that requires some affinity for a metanarrative that is "honest, coherent, and reasonably complete" (p. 21). Intellectual history helps McClay in this effort. The question then becomes whether we can have substantive metanarratives while avoiding the older, much-abused (rightly) trap of "grand narratives"? (p. 16).
Wickberg, in his final rejoinder, argues aggressively that a history-of-ideas approach is the answer for showing intellectual history's importance in a survey setting. That approach both allows for topical flexibility and reinforces the notion that intellectuals and great thinkers are important for understanding the ebb and flow of U.S. history. Wickberg wants us to "see ideas themselves in the driver's seat," not just people (to avoid the elite trap) or topics, as I see it, such as politics or class or gender or race (p. 24). He also desires us to "foreground ideas" in general and understand "ideas as a force in history" (p. 22-23). By doing these things, I would say that all historians will run much less risk of parochializing history in terms of particular ideas. By foregrounding ideas we will give those on the outside a greater sense of what some mid-century thinkers called "the great conversation" about the "great ideas." We will make history more about the liberal arts and social sciences, and less about antiquarianism or a narrow political-ideological agenda. By thinking of ideas as a "force in history," intellectual historians can help forward the interdisciplinary cause and make the subfield popular among non-professional audiences.
[This concludes Part I. Part II will explore Relational Issues within the hierarchy of my tripartite taxonomy, and will likely go up here on Monday, 10/12/2009.]
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