Conference: The Role of Opinion Journalism in American Intellectual History

If only I lived in New York! Participants in this exciting half-day conference include two historians scheduled to speak on one of our plenaries at the upcoming USIH conference--Casey Nelson Blake and Rochelle Gurstein.

From the Columbia University website:

Columbia University to Host Conference on the Journalism of Opinion

The Friends of Columbia Libraries are pleased to co-sponsor a conference on opinion journalism in American intellectual history. The half-day conference, entitled “The Journalism of Opinion,” will take place on Friday, April 30, 2010, from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm at the Lecture Hall on the 3rd floor of Columbia University’s Journalism School. The event is free and open to the public.

The keynote will be delivered by Victor Navasky, Delacorte Professor of Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review. Panel participants include Casey Nelson Blake, Eric Alterman, Howard Brick, Rochelle Gurstein, Michael Kazin, Stanley Crouch, Andi Zeisler, and Mark Lotto. Dean Nicholas Lemann, Henry R. Luce Professor, Columbia Journalism School, will make the opening remarks.

The journalism of opinion has played a significant role in twentieth-century American intellectual history. From its beginnings in a paper-only format to today’s purely digital spaces, the influence of opinion journalism has remained strong, although the message has outlasted its original medium. This conference will offer thoughts on the journalism of opinion—past, present, and future—by scholars and writers.

The impetus for the conference is the presence at Columbia University of The New Leader magazine and archives. The event is co-sponsored by the Friends of Columbia Libraries and by Columbia University’s American Studies Program; Journalism School; Rare Book & Manuscript Library; and the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History.

To register for this event visit www.alumni.libraries.columbia.edu and click on “News and Events” or send an email to cul-events@columbia.edu. For further information about the event, contact Eric Wakin (etw2@columbia.edu), Lehman Curator for American History, at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Conference: The Role of Opinion Journalism in American Intellectual History

If only I lived in New York! Participants in this exciting half-day conference include two historians scheduled to speak on one of our plenaries at the upcoming USIH conference--Casey Nelson Blake and Rochelle Gurstein.

From the Columbia University website:

Columbia University to Host Conference on the Journalism of Opinion

The Friends of Columbia Libraries are pleased to co-sponsor a conference on opinion journalism in American intellectual history. The half-day conference, entitled “The Journalism of Opinion,” will take place on Friday, April 30, 2010, from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm at the Lecture Hall on the 3rd floor of Columbia University’s Journalism School. The event is free and open to the public.

The keynote will be delivered by Victor Navasky, Delacorte Professor of Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review. Panel participants include Casey Nelson Blake, Eric Alterman, Howard Brick, Rochelle Gurstein, Michael Kazin, Stanley Crouch, Andi Zeisler, and Mark Lotto. Dean Nicholas Lemann, Henry R. Luce Professor, Columbia Journalism School, will make the opening remarks.

The journalism of opinion has played a significant role in twentieth-century American intellectual history. From its beginnings in a paper-only format to today’s purely digital spaces, the influence of opinion journalism has remained strong, although the message has outlasted its original medium. This conference will offer thoughts on the journalism of opinion—past, present, and future—by scholars and writers.

The impetus for the conference is the presence at Columbia University of The New Leader magazine and archives. The event is co-sponsored by the Friends of Columbia Libraries and by Columbia University’s American Studies Program; Journalism School; Rare Book & Manuscript Library; and the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History.

To register for this event visit www.alumni.libraries.columbia.edu and click on “News and Events” or send an email to cul-events@columbia.edu. For further information about the event, contact Eric Wakin (etw2@columbia.edu), Lehman Curator for American History, at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Lauren's Light Listening

I heard in today's NY Times Book Review podcast an interesting interview of Alan Brinkley about his new biography of Henry Luce. I used James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men for a Historical Methods course once--it was a great book to discuss the difficulties of truth seeking. Agee wrote it will working on the Fortune staff.

The executive editor of the Times, Bill Keller reviewed the book in this weekend's Times. A snippet:

His Luce is a complicated figure, more tragic than malign. That is not to say this is a particularly flattering profile. The book does full justice to Luce’s outsider insecurity, his blind affinity for men of power and his defects as a family man. But it is a humanizing portrayal, and it credits the role his magazines, Time and Life especially, played in a country growing uneasily into the dominant geopolitical force in the world. Luce’s publications served as a kind of cultural adhesive that bound the middle class to a shared understanding of the world and ushered it through periods of war and economic hardship. It’s hard to imagine any outlet playing such a role in today’s dis­aggregated media environment.

The podcast also contains a story about a biography of Muriel Spark, a novelist I hadn't heard of, but who sounds like someone I'd like to check out. She at first gave the biographer complete access to all her stuff and said "treat me as if I were dead." But then she hated the book and held up it's publication for years.

Lauren's Light Listening

I heard in today's NY Times Book Review podcast an interesting interview of Alan Brinkley about his new biography of Henry Luce. I used James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men for a Historical Methods course once--it was a great book to discuss the difficulties of truth seeking. Agee wrote it will working on the Fortune staff.

The executive editor of the Times, Bill Keller reviewed the book in this weekend's Times. A snippet:

His Luce is a complicated figure, more tragic than malign. That is not to say this is a particularly flattering profile. The book does full justice to Luce’s outsider insecurity, his blind affinity for men of power and his defects as a family man. But it is a humanizing portrayal, and it credits the role his magazines, Time and Life especially, played in a country growing uneasily into the dominant geopolitical force in the world. Luce’s publications served as a kind of cultural adhesive that bound the middle class to a shared understanding of the world and ushered it through periods of war and economic hardship. It’s hard to imagine any outlet playing such a role in today’s dis­aggregated media environment.

The podcast also contains a story about a biography of Muriel Spark, a novelist I hadn't heard of, but who sounds like someone I'd like to check out. She at first gave the biographer complete access to all her stuff and said "treat me as if I were dead." But then she hated the book and held up it's publication for years.

Rachel Carson Docudrama

Do you use film in intellectual history courses?

I hadn't thought about it before, though I did see a fairly interesting film on Gertrude Stein. However, I just flipped to PBS and there is this stunning docudrama about Rachel Carson on. It is an actress portraying Rachel Carson in the last year of her life, delivering all of her ideas. Might make interesting watching in a class (though it might be slow for undergrads. I love films with careful characterization and interesting dialogue, but not all undergrads do).

Rachel Carson Docudrama

Do you use film in intellectual history courses?

I hadn't thought about it before, though I did see a fairly interesting film on Gertrude Stein. However, I just flipped to PBS and there is this stunning docudrama about Rachel Carson on. It is an actress portraying Rachel Carson in the last year of her life, delivering all of her ideas. Might make interesting watching in a class (though it might be slow for undergrads. I love films with careful characterization and interesting dialogue, but not all undergrads do).

Fulbright Lectureship in U.S. Intellectual History in Rome

An exciting opportunity: Fulbright Lectureship in U.S. intellectual history in the American Studies Department at the University in Rome for spring 2012. You can find information at this link (scroll to the bottom of the page). Casey Nelson Blake, Alex Bloom, George Cotkin, and Greg Sumner have held this lectureship in the past.

Fulbright Lectureship in U.S. Intellectual History in Rome

An exciting opportunity: Fulbright Lectureship in U.S. intellectual history in the American Studies Department at the University in Rome for spring 2012. You can find information at this link (scroll to the bottom of the page). Casey Nelson Blake, Alex Bloom, George Cotkin, and Greg Sumner have held this lectureship in the past.

Summers on Thoreau

John Summers, author of the excellent Every Fury on Earth, reviews a new edited collection of Thoreau at The New Republic. I thought it might be of interest to several of our readers. I love Summers's concluding paragraph:

"But anyone reading these lines should check the impulse to feel superior. If Thoreau paid for his industrial exemption with disorientation, then the regularity and benignity of nature, the turn of the seasons, saved his equilibrum in the end, and warded off the self-estrangement so prominent in modern confessional writing. Today, private life is history, and day and night a distinction without a difference. For ages, the act of writing has seemed to authors like the experience of dreaming. But we are not likely to read anything like Thoreau’s journal again."

Summers on Thoreau

John Summers, author of the excellent Every Fury on Earth, reviews a new edited collection of Thoreau at The New Republic. I thought it might be of interest to several of our readers. I love Summers's concluding paragraph:

"But anyone reading these lines should check the impulse to feel superior. If Thoreau paid for his industrial exemption with disorientation, then the regularity and benignity of nature, the turn of the seasons, saved his equilibrum in the end, and warded off the self-estrangement so prominent in modern confessional writing. Today, private life is history, and day and night a distinction without a difference. For ages, the act of writing has seemed to authors like the experience of dreaming. But we are not likely to read anything like Thoreau’s journal again."

Info for Historians of Conservative Thought and those interested in Anti-Intellectualism in the US

I just noticed that Thomas Sowell has a new book out called "Intellectuals and Society." In a column in the Jewish World Review explaining the book, he argues that

Those whose careers are built on the creation and dissemination of ideas — the intellectuals — have played a role in many societies out of all proportion to their numbers. ...

But certainly, for the 20th century, it is hard to escape the conclusion that intellectuals have on net balance made the world a worse and more dangerous place. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the 20th century was without his supporters, admirers or apologists among the leading intellectuals — not only within his own country, but in foreign democracies, where intellectuals were free to say whatever they wanted to.

Given the enormous progress made during the 20th century, it may seem hard to believe that intellectuals did so little good as to have that good outweighed by particular wrong-headed notions. But most of those who promoted the scientific, economic and social advances of the 20th century were not really intellectuals in the sense in which that term is most often used. [People who created tangible things that flew or did not fly (in the example he gives of the Wright Brothers) rather than the intangible products of "intellectuals"]

He continues in a second article:

If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences. But intellectuals who generate ideas do not have to pay the consequences.

Academic intellectuals are shielded by the principles of academic freedom and journalists in democratic societies are shielded by the principle of freedom of the press. Seldom do those who produce or peddle dangerous, or even fatal, ideas have to pay a price, even in a loss of credibility.

He gives Rachel Carson as his first example, arguing that her crusade against DDT led to the resurgence of malaria. For his second example, he argues that Woodrow Wilson advocated changes for the sake of change in the aftermath of WWI, leading to the disastrous totalitarian regimes of WWII.

Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.

What do you all think of his argument? It seems to me like Sowell is at once giving intellectuals more power than they actually had (Wilson did not create self-determination in a vacuum, absent the desires of those elasticities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the Ottoman Empire was not carved up just because he said so) and then criticizing them for the outcomes. He also seems to think that Wilson is generally praised for his efforts; that isn't the case in the history I study.

Some of his arguments remind me of those who criticized American and Western European communists in the 1950s and later. The ideas they played with were much too dangerous.

Do you have a sense of how influential Sowell is these days? I have the impression that a few years ago, he was a major presence. Is he still?

Info for Historians of Conservative Thought and those interested in Anti-Intellectualism in the US

I just noticed that Thomas Sowell has a new book out called "Intellectuals and Society." In a column in the Jewish World Review explaining the book, he argues that

Those whose careers are built on the creation and dissemination of ideas — the intellectuals — have played a role in many societies out of all proportion to their numbers. ...

But certainly, for the 20th century, it is hard to escape the conclusion that intellectuals have on net balance made the world a worse and more dangerous place. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the 20th century was without his supporters, admirers or apologists among the leading intellectuals — not only within his own country, but in foreign democracies, where intellectuals were free to say whatever they wanted to.

Given the enormous progress made during the 20th century, it may seem hard to believe that intellectuals did so little good as to have that good outweighed by particular wrong-headed notions. But most of those who promoted the scientific, economic and social advances of the 20th century were not really intellectuals in the sense in which that term is most often used. [People who created tangible things that flew or did not fly (in the example he gives of the Wright Brothers) rather than the intangible products of "intellectuals"]

He continues in a second article:

If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences. But intellectuals who generate ideas do not have to pay the consequences.

Academic intellectuals are shielded by the principles of academic freedom and journalists in democratic societies are shielded by the principle of freedom of the press. Seldom do those who produce or peddle dangerous, or even fatal, ideas have to pay a price, even in a loss of credibility.

He gives Rachel Carson as his first example, arguing that her crusade against DDT led to the resurgence of malaria. For his second example, he argues that Woodrow Wilson advocated changes for the sake of change in the aftermath of WWI, leading to the disastrous totalitarian regimes of WWII.

Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.

What do you all think of his argument? It seems to me like Sowell is at once giving intellectuals more power than they actually had (Wilson did not create self-determination in a vacuum, absent the desires of those elasticities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the Ottoman Empire was not carved up just because he said so) and then criticizing them for the outcomes. He also seems to think that Wilson is generally praised for his efforts; that isn't the case in the history I study.

Some of his arguments remind me of those who criticized American and Western European communists in the 1950s and later. The ideas they played with were much too dangerous.

Do you have a sense of how influential Sowell is these days? I have the impression that a few years ago, he was a major presence. Is he still?

Lies, Damned Lies, And Stephen Ambrose: A Warning To The Profession

I just read this New Yorker story thanks to my e-friend and colleague, Kevin Levin. The gist is this: Stephen Ambrose lied, distorted, and embellished his level of personal contact with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in order to make a name for himself. Here are the lies:

(1) Eisenhower didn't initiate contact with Ambrose, contrary to later stories by Ambrose.
(2) They met 3 times totaling 5 hours, not many times totaling hundreds of hours over 5 years.
(3) Ambrose was never alone with Eisenhower.
(4) Ambrose compounded his lies by distorting the nature and extent of the interviews in subsequent books, polluting the historiography of a generation.

Amazing. But what I find really interesting is that someone from the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum didn't expose this years ago. I mean, Ambrose has been on the list of suspect historians now for about 15-20 years.

I wonder what the most famous fraud or lie is in terms of U.S. intellectual historiography? - TL

Lies, Damned Lies, And Stephen Ambrose: A Warning To The Profession

I just read this New Yorker story thanks to my e-friend and colleague, Kevin Levin. The gist is this: Stephen Ambrose lied, distorted, and embellished his level of personal contact with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in order to make a name for himself. Here are the lies:

(1) Eisenhower didn't initiate contact with Ambrose, contrary to later stories by Ambrose.
(2) They met 3 times totaling 5 hours, not many times totaling hundreds of hours over 5 years.
(3) Ambrose was never alone with Eisenhower.
(4) Ambrose compounded his lies by distorting the nature and extent of the interviews in subsequent books, polluting the historiography of a generation.

Amazing. But what I find really interesting is that someone from the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum didn't expose this years ago. I mean, Ambrose has been on the list of suspect historians now for about 15-20 years.

I wonder what the most famous fraud or lie is in terms of U.S. intellectual historiography? - TL

Reflections on Intellectual History at the OAH

I was present at two sessions on intellectual history at last week’s annual meeting of the OAH in Washington, D.C., one as a participant and one as an audience member. Both took place in packed rooms. This prompted several intellectual historians to suggest, with enthusiasm, that we seem to be in the midst of a U.S. intellectual history revival. Some even hinted that the USIH Blog and Conference might have something to do with this renewal. I would like for us to have a sustained conversation about what might be prompting such a revival. What about our current moment is ripe for intellectual history? Perhaps we might convene a blog roundtable to tease out some answers to this question? Or a panel at our upcoming conference?

My panel, “Relativism and Its Discontents in Modern American Thought,” consisted of me, fellow USIH blogger Ben Alpers, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. Casey Blake chaired; Bruce Kuklick commented. Jennifer went first, giving an eloquent paper on how black intellectual-activists such as Hubert Harrison, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Huey P. Newton appropriated Nietzsche to overturn the epistemological foundations of white racism. Rather than take on Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism, rather than admit to the death of God, these African-American thinkers built a more just foundation from which to seek equality. I loved Jennifer’s paper. It seems Kuklick enjoyed it as well. He said that he “liked Ratner-Rosenhagen’s way of putting this position. Black thinkers have a penchant for an anti-foundationalist epistemology and a foundationalist morality. In plainer academic English, for these black critics our empirical endeavors, which we usually consider less arguable, became subjective; morality, which we always argue over, became objective.”

Ben’s fascinating paper then sought to explain the Straussian interventions in political science during the 1960s. Ben convincingly argued that conservative critics of the academy picked up the Straussian critique of relativism and naturalism, which dominated the political science discipline at the time. In other words, anti-relativism worked well alongside conservative positions vis-à-vis the liberal academy, evidenced by how William F. Buckley famously lashed out at the relativism and socialism of his Yale professors in his famous 1955 missive, God and Man at Yale. I picked up where Ben left off by relating the anti-relativism of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind to right-wing positions on educational issues such as multiculturalism and affirmative action, positions best explicated by Dinesh D’Souza and Lynne Cheney.

Kuklick did not appreciate our papers quite as much as he did Jennifer's. He critiqued us for arguing that anti-relativism worked best alongside conservative positions (which we didn’t argue), and for ignoring the number of left and liberal thinkers who espoused anti-relativist positions, such as Noam Chomsky (who were not the subjects of our papers). Kuklick, in his words, “pushed the discussion to insinuate that we presume relativism to be the norm and anti-relativism to require interpretation, its adherents subjected to a kind of therapy.” To this extent, Kuklick’s main complaint seemed to be with historians more broadly. To him, we are disconnected from philosophical currents. Philosophers, he intimates, think discussions of relativism and pragmatism quaint at best.

Ben came right back at Kuklick, in one of the best moments of the session, by saying that he agreed with Kuklick’s critique, except that it had nothing to do with his paper. This was my sense of Kuklick’s critique as well. He seemed to ignore that, in my conclusion, I quoted Terry Eagleton to argue that the best critique of conservative anti-relativism was from a left-wing absolutist vantage point: “If true loses its force, then political radicals can stop talking as though it is unequivocally true that women are oppressed or that the planet is being gradually poisoned by corporate greed.” That said, I think Kuklick nicely pushed the conversation. He certainly played the role of cantankerous senior scholar to good effect. I hope I get to play that role some day.

The second intellectual history panel that I attended was on “The New Intellectual History of Conservatism.” The speakers were Jennifer Burns, Beverly Gage, and Angus Burgin. (Click on their names to see video footage of their talks.) I enjoyed the session, but to be quite honest, I didn’t come away thinking there was anything very new about how they framed the latest scholarship. Sure, there has been really good work done, especially Burns’s recent intellectual biography of Ayn Rand. But I don’t see any new paradigms. In fact, I was a little disappointed by the defensive tone. They seem to think that the history of pointy-headed intellectuals is not sufficient—that intellectual history must rationalize its existence by linkages to things that truly matter to most people, such as experience, or politics. Now, as someone who writes mostly about intellectual history as political culture, perhaps I’m the wrong person to argue against such a conception of intellectual history. But this so-called “new” approach seems to replicate older worries that led to the death of intellectual history. It does not seem to be in the spirit of “revival.” I welcome comments!!!

Reflections on Intellectual History at the OAH

I was present at two sessions on intellectual history at last week’s annual meeting of the OAH in Washington, D.C., one as a participant and one as an audience member. Both took place in packed rooms. This prompted several intellectual historians to suggest, with enthusiasm, that we seem to be in the midst of a U.S. intellectual history revival. Some even hinted that the USIH Blog and Conference might have something to do with this renewal. I would like for us to have a sustained conversation about what might be prompting such a revival. What about our current moment is ripe for intellectual history? Perhaps we might convene a blog roundtable to tease out some answers to this question? Or a panel at our upcoming conference?

My panel, “Relativism and Its Discontents in Modern American Thought,” consisted of me, fellow USIH blogger Ben Alpers, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. Casey Blake chaired; Bruce Kuklick commented. Jennifer went first, giving an eloquent paper on how black intellectual-activists such as Hubert Harrison, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Huey P. Newton appropriated Nietzsche to overturn the epistemological foundations of white racism. Rather than take on Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism, rather than admit to the death of God, these African-American thinkers built a more just foundation from which to seek equality. I loved Jennifer’s paper. It seems Kuklick enjoyed it as well. He said that he “liked Ratner-Rosenhagen’s way of putting this position. Black thinkers have a penchant for an anti-foundationalist epistemology and a foundationalist morality. In plainer academic English, for these black critics our empirical endeavors, which we usually consider less arguable, became subjective; morality, which we always argue over, became objective.”

Ben’s fascinating paper then sought to explain the Straussian interventions in political science during the 1960s. Ben convincingly argued that conservative critics of the academy picked up the Straussian critique of relativism and naturalism, which dominated the political science discipline at the time. In other words, anti-relativism worked well alongside conservative positions vis-à-vis the liberal academy, evidenced by how William F. Buckley famously lashed out at the relativism and socialism of his Yale professors in his famous 1955 missive, God and Man at Yale. I picked up where Ben left off by relating the anti-relativism of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind to right-wing positions on educational issues such as multiculturalism and affirmative action, positions best explicated by Dinesh D’Souza and Lynne Cheney.

Kuklick did not appreciate our papers quite as much as he did Jennifer's. He critiqued us for arguing that anti-relativism worked best alongside conservative positions (which we didn’t argue), and for ignoring the number of left and liberal thinkers who espoused anti-relativist positions, such as Noam Chomsky (who were not the subjects of our papers). Kuklick, in his words, “pushed the discussion to insinuate that we presume relativism to be the norm and anti-relativism to require interpretation, its adherents subjected to a kind of therapy.” To this extent, Kuklick’s main complaint seemed to be with historians more broadly. To him, we are disconnected from philosophical currents. Philosophers, he intimates, think discussions of relativism and pragmatism quaint at best.

Ben came right back at Kuklick, in one of the best moments of the session, by saying that he agreed with Kuklick’s critique, except that it had nothing to do with his paper. This was my sense of Kuklick’s critique as well. He seemed to ignore that, in my conclusion, I quoted Terry Eagleton to argue that the best critique of conservative anti-relativism was from a left-wing absolutist vantage point: “If true loses its force, then political radicals can stop talking as though it is unequivocally true that women are oppressed or that the planet is being gradually poisoned by corporate greed.” That said, I think Kuklick nicely pushed the conversation. He certainly played the role of cantankerous senior scholar to good effect. I hope I get to play that role some day.

The second intellectual history panel that I attended was on “The New Intellectual History of Conservatism.” The speakers were Jennifer Burns, Beverly Gage, and Angus Burgin. (Click on their names to see video footage of their talks.) I enjoyed the session, but to be quite honest, I didn’t come away thinking there was anything very new about how they framed the latest scholarship. Sure, there has been really good work done, especially Burns’s recent intellectual biography of Ayn Rand. But I don’t see any new paradigms. In fact, I was a little disappointed by the defensive tone. They seem to think that the history of pointy-headed intellectuals is not sufficient—that intellectual history must rationalize its existence by linkages to things that truly matter to most people, such as experience, or politics. Now, as someone who writes mostly about intellectual history as political culture, perhaps I’m the wrong person to argue against such a conception of intellectual history. But this so-called “new” approach seems to replicate older worries that led to the death of intellectual history. It does not seem to be in the spirit of “revival.” I welcome comments!!!

A nice bit of interdisciplinarity--The Rites of Spring

While on a university committee a couple of years ago, I read numerous criticism and praise of interdisciplinary research and teaching, but I found concrete examples of it excellently performed much less available. So when my off-time radio listening crossed my academic world a few months ago in this very promising bit of interdisciplinarity, I got very excited.

Let me introduce the event in question. Both Modris Eksteins' The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age and Radio Lab's episode "Musical Language" try to explain the violent riots that occurred in Paris following the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's ballet "The Rites of Spring" in May 1913. Elegant concert goers jumped out of their seats and started throwing things. Someone off to the side of the stage had to yell the count of the dance, because the dancers could not hear the music over the screaming of the crowd. The riots turned into wide acceptance of the second performance less than a year later, March 1914. The music used new combination of notes that did not reconcile like all previous music. The ballet illustrated a virginal sacrifice and used movements borrowing from societies that later fed the "primitive" vogue in Europe after WWI. The dancers movements were not all elegant.

Eksteins uses the ballet as a case study/metaphor for the historical and political transition into the Modern Age and to do a cultural study of Germans, the British, and the French (and to some extent the Americans) as they entered WWI. RadioLab suggests that brain chemistry--what goes on in the brain when it hears discordant notes--could explain the rioting and that physiological changes in the brain that may have made a Parisian audience ready to hear and love Stravinsky's symphony nine months after their riots.

RadioLab discusses a connection between music and emotion. Mark Jude Tramo, a neuroscientist at Harvard, listens to electricity that runs from the ear to the brain in response to a sound. Even and regular meter of the electricity arrives in our mind as something we like (consonant). If the electricity is in an irregular, jagged meter it is heard by our brain as something we don't like (dissonant). What we find pleasant and unpleasant is malleable. While the audience rioted in response to the music at the first performance of The Rites of Spring, by the second concert, Parisians knew what to expect. The science writer Jonah Lehrer interprets this difference for RadioLab based upon the way the dissonant sounds acted on the audience's brain trained by 19th century Romanticism. When we hear noises we've never heard before, dissonant chords "illicit wild fluctuations in brain activity" (Jan Fischman, neuroscientist). Gangs of neurons, the new noise department, get very agitated by dissonant chords and their job is to dissect and understand new noises. Every so often they fail, like they did that night, failing over and over b/c the Rite of Spring is dissonant all the way through. Chemical consequences in the brain--the release of a lot of dopamine--means that the euphoria turns literally into schizophrenia. People went mad because the music made the neurons fail to order it, releasing too much dopamine, driving the audience crazy.

During the second concert, the audience was ready to hear the patterns that Stravinsky had hidden within the music. The audience carried Stravinsky out of the theater on their shoulders. The response by the audience and the press was glowing the second time. Neurons learned and adjusted.

In his 1989 text, Modris Eksteins offers a very different interpretation, using history, politics, and culture rather than the processes of individual brains. (I'm going to offer several quotes, because I love Eksteins' writing and because it's been several years since I read the text).

The book was then at the vanguard of cultural history and reception studies (and offers a very powerful template for them):

In modern society, as this book will argue, the audience for the arts, as for hobbits and heroes, is for the historian an even more important source of evidence for cultural identity than the literary documents, artistic artifacts, or heroes themselves. The history of modern culture ought then to be as much a history of response as of challenge, an account of the reader as of the novel, of the viewer as of the film, of the spectator as of the actor.

He writes that there were two factions ready to war in the audience:

Of the crowd of aesthetes, whether becapped or hirsute, who attended this and similar events Cocteau said that ‘they would applaud novelty at random simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes.’ In short, a readymade cheering section ws present, prepared to do battle against sterility. ...

To turn ballet, the most effervescent and fluid of art forms, into grotesque caricature was to insult good taste and the integrity of the audience. That was the attitude of the opposition. It felt offended. It jeered. Applause was the response of the defenders. And so the battle was joined...

Personal insults were certainly exchanged; probably some punches, too; maybe cards, to arrange a semblance of satisfaction afterward....

A countess supposed exclaimed “I am sixty years old and this is the first time anyone has dared to make fun of me...

Of outrage and excitement there was plenty. Indeed, there was such a din that the music may have been almost drowned out at times.

But drowned out completely? Some reports leave the impression that no one, apart from the musicians in the orchestra nd Pierre Monteaux, the conductor, heard the music after the opening bars—not even the dancers....

Where does all this confusion [of reporting] leave us? Is there not sufficient evidence to suggest that the trouble was caused more by warring factions in the audience, by their expectations, their prejudices, their preconceptions about art, than by the work itself? The work, as we shall see, certainly exploited tensions but hardly caused them. The descriptions of the memoirists and even the accounts of the critics are immersed in the scandale rather than the music and ballet, in the even rather than the art. None of the witnesses ever mentions the rest of the program that first evening…

Thus Eksteins says that the work was a catalyst for already existing societal stressors and the work itself (or what it did to individual brains) did not cause the riot at all.

the response of the audience was and is as important to the meaning of this art as the intentions of those who introduced it. Art has transcended reason, didacticism, and a moral purpose: art has become provocation and event.

Thus, Jean Cocteau, who in his staccato prose—which corresponds so well with the percussive diction of Le Sacre—has given us many of our lasting images of that opening night, did not hesitate to admit that he was more concerned with ‘subjective’ than ‘objective’ truth; in other words, with what he felt, what he imagined, not with what actually occurred.”

Where does the fiction end and the fact begin? That boisterous evening rightly stands as a symbol of its era and as a landmark of this century. From the setting in the newly constructed, ultramodern Theatre des Champes-Elysees, in Paris, through the ideas and intentions of the leading protagonists, to the tumultuous response of the audience, that opening night of Le Sacre represents a milestone in the development of ‘modernism,’ modernism as above all a culture of the sensational event, through which art and life both become a matter of energy and are fused as one. Given the crucial significance of the audience in this culture, we must look at the broader context of Le Sacre.

Hmmm, where does that leave us? Does having both interpretations of the event make our own understanding larger or does one threaten to undermine the other?

A nice bit of interdisciplinarity--The Rites of Spring

While on a university committee a couple of years ago, I read numerous criticism and praise of interdisciplinary research and teaching, but I found concrete examples of it excellently performed much less available. So when my off-time radio listening crossed my academic world a few months ago in this very promising bit of interdisciplinarity, I got very excited.

Let me introduce the event in question. Both Modris Eksteins' The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age and Radio Lab's episode "Musical Language" try to explain the violent riots that occurred in Paris following the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's ballet "The Rites of Spring" in May 1913. Elegant concert goers jumped out of their seats and started throwing things. Someone off to the side of the stage had to yell the count of the dance, because the dancers could not hear the music over the screaming of the crowd. The riots turned into wide acceptance of the second performance less than a year later, March 1914. The music used new combination of notes that did not reconcile like all previous music. The ballet illustrated a virginal sacrifice and used movements borrowing from societies that later fed the "primitive" vogue in Europe after WWI. The dancers movements were not all elegant.

Eksteins uses the ballet as a case study/metaphor for the historical and political transition into the Modern Age and to do a cultural study of Germans, the British, and the French (and to some extent the Americans) as they entered WWI. RadioLab suggests that brain chemistry--what goes on in the brain when it hears discordant notes--could explain the rioting and that physiological changes in the brain that may have made a Parisian audience ready to hear and love Stravinsky's symphony nine months after their riots.

RadioLab discusses a connection between music and emotion. Mark Jude Tramo, a neuroscientist at Harvard, listens to electricity that runs from the ear to the brain in response to a sound. Even and regular meter of the electricity arrives in our mind as something we like (consonant). If the electricity is in an irregular, jagged meter it is heard by our brain as something we don't like (dissonant). What we find pleasant and unpleasant is malleable. While the audience rioted in response to the music at the first performance of The Rites of Spring, by the second concert, Parisians knew what to expect. The science writer Jonah Lehrer interprets this difference for RadioLab based upon the way the dissonant sounds acted on the audience's brain trained by 19th century Romanticism. When we hear noises we've never heard before, dissonant chords "illicit wild fluctuations in brain activity" (Jan Fischman, neuroscientist). Gangs of neurons, the new noise department, get very agitated by dissonant chords and their job is to dissect and understand new noises. Every so often they fail, like they did that night, failing over and over b/c the Rite of Spring is dissonant all the way through. Chemical consequences in the brain--the release of a lot of dopamine--means that the euphoria turns literally into schizophrenia. People went mad because the music made the neurons fail to order it, releasing too much dopamine, driving the audience crazy.

During the second concert, the audience was ready to hear the patterns that Stravinsky had hidden within the music. The audience carried Stravinsky out of the theater on their shoulders. The response by the audience and the press was glowing the second time. Neurons learned and adjusted.

In his 1989 text, Modris Eksteins offers a very different interpretation, using history, politics, and culture rather than the processes of individual brains. (I'm going to offer several quotes, because I love Eksteins' writing and because it's been several years since I read the text).

The book was then at the vanguard of cultural history and reception studies (and offers a very powerful template for them):

In modern society, as this book will argue, the audience for the arts, as for hobbits and heroes, is for the historian an even more important source of evidence for cultural identity than the literary documents, artistic artifacts, or heroes themselves. The history of modern culture ought then to be as much a history of response as of challenge, an account of the reader as of the novel, of the viewer as of the film, of the spectator as of the actor.

He writes that there were two factions ready to war in the audience:

Of the crowd of aesthetes, whether becapped or hirsute, who attended this and similar events Cocteau said that ‘they would applaud novelty at random simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes.’ In short, a readymade cheering section ws present, prepared to do battle against sterility. ...

To turn ballet, the most effervescent and fluid of art forms, into grotesque caricature was to insult good taste and the integrity of the audience. That was the attitude of the opposition. It felt offended. It jeered. Applause was the response of the defenders. And so the battle was joined...

Personal insults were certainly exchanged; probably some punches, too; maybe cards, to arrange a semblance of satisfaction afterward....

A countess supposed exclaimed “I am sixty years old and this is the first time anyone has dared to make fun of me...

Of outrage and excitement there was plenty. Indeed, there was such a din that the music may have been almost drowned out at times.

But drowned out completely? Some reports leave the impression that no one, apart from the musicians in the orchestra nd Pierre Monteaux, the conductor, heard the music after the opening bars—not even the dancers....

Where does all this confusion [of reporting] leave us? Is there not sufficient evidence to suggest that the trouble was caused more by warring factions in the audience, by their expectations, their prejudices, their preconceptions about art, than by the work itself? The work, as we shall see, certainly exploited tensions but hardly caused them. The descriptions of the memoirists and even the accounts of the critics are immersed in the scandale rather than the music and ballet, in the even rather than the art. None of the witnesses ever mentions the rest of the program that first evening…

Thus Eksteins says that the work was a catalyst for already existing societal stressors and the work itself (or what it did to individual brains) did not cause the riot at all.

the response of the audience was and is as important to the meaning of this art as the intentions of those who introduced it. Art has transcended reason, didacticism, and a moral purpose: art has become provocation and event.

Thus, Jean Cocteau, who in his staccato prose—which corresponds so well with the percussive diction of Le Sacre—has given us many of our lasting images of that opening night, did not hesitate to admit that he was more concerned with ‘subjective’ than ‘objective’ truth; in other words, with what he felt, what he imagined, not with what actually occurred.”

Where does the fiction end and the fact begin? That boisterous evening rightly stands as a symbol of its era and as a landmark of this century. From the setting in the newly constructed, ultramodern Theatre des Champes-Elysees, in Paris, through the ideas and intentions of the leading protagonists, to the tumultuous response of the audience, that opening night of Le Sacre represents a milestone in the development of ‘modernism,’ modernism as above all a culture of the sensational event, through which art and life both become a matter of energy and are fused as one. Given the crucial significance of the audience in this culture, we must look at the broader context of Le Sacre.

Hmmm, where does that leave us? Does having both interpretations of the event make our own understanding larger or does one threaten to undermine the other?

Lacy On Cándida Smith: Thinking Through Modern Art

Review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-8122-4188-4. 252 pages.

Review by Tim Lacy
University of Illinois at Chicago
April 2010


Thinking Through Modern Art


In The Modern Moves West, Berkeley Professor Richard Cándida Smith tackles the intellectual and cultural history of modern art in California. He explores aesthetic theory, the core-periphery tension in the institutional art world, art education, and the potentially explosive intersections of art and politics. By focusing on visual, stationary media in the work of Sam Rodia, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Noah Purifoy, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Daniel Joseph Martínez, Cándida Smith presents an incredibly rich look at California’s pantheon of twentieth-century modern artists.

To read this book is to enter a world where a particular community used painting, sculpture, and assemblage art to grapple with the acids and innovations of modernity. In relation to California and the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s notion of a “the legacy of conquest” is implicitly at work in Cándida Smith’s narrative. California is indeed a land of jostling due to internal migration, immigration, and racial politics.[1] But this book concentrates on explaining how modern art, and its postmodern successors, assisted in bringing these conflicting cultural visions together under a democratic aesthetic as the twentieth century progressed.

The Modern Moves West is a recent addition to Penn Press’s new series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America,” edited by Casey Nelson Blake. That series welcomes manuscripts “in architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature.” Thus far the visual arts seem prominent, but there are only six books in the series.[2] If Cándida Smith’s contribution is indicative of the series on the whole, then that endeavor is intent on underscoring how art enriches America’s intellectual life, and how all of this comes together to foster (or hamper) democracy.

In his introduction, Cándida Smith offers a number of formulations of his thesis in relation to the themes outlined above. I believe, however, that the following ...[Continue here]

Lacy On Cándida Smith: Thinking Through Modern Art

Review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-8122-4188-4. 252 pages.

Review by Tim Lacy
University of Illinois at Chicago
April 2010


Thinking Through Modern Art


In The Modern Moves West, Berkeley Professor Richard Cándida Smith tackles the intellectual and cultural history of modern art in California. He explores aesthetic theory, the core-periphery tension in the institutional art world, art education, and the potentially explosive intersections of art and politics. By focusing on visual, stationary media in the work of Sam Rodia, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Noah Purifoy, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Daniel Joseph Martínez, Cándida Smith presents an incredibly rich look at California’s pantheon of twentieth-century modern artists.

To read this book is to enter a world where a particular community used painting, sculpture, and assemblage art to grapple with the acids and innovations of modernity. In relation to California and the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s notion of a “the legacy of conquest” is implicitly at work in Cándida Smith’s narrative. California is indeed a land of jostling due to internal migration, immigration, and racial politics.[1] But this book concentrates on explaining how modern art, and its postmodern successors, assisted in bringing these conflicting cultural visions together under a democratic aesthetic as the twentieth century progressed.

The Modern Moves West is a recent addition to Penn Press’s new series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America,” edited by Casey Nelson Blake. That series welcomes manuscripts “in architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature.” Thus far the visual arts seem prominent, but there are only six books in the series.[2] If Cándida Smith’s contribution is indicative of the series on the whole, then that endeavor is intent on underscoring how art enriches America’s intellectual life, and how all of this comes together to foster (or hamper) democracy.

In his introduction, Cándida Smith offers a number of formulations of his thesis in relation to the themes outlined above. I believe, however, that the following ...[Continue here]

Research Issues: JAH's RSO Function And New Works On U.S. Intellectual History

If you don't already take advantage of your JAH subscription to receive what's called an RSO update (Recent Scholarship Online), I would encourage you to do so.

Below is a selection of new books and articles on intellectual history received by JAH since the last RSO update in March. I say "received" because not all of the works were published in 2010. This list has been thinned out a bit because I deleted sublistings of individual contributions from the Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna edited collection.

You can set up your RSO to screen by categories and keywords. Here are mine (reflective of my ongoing projects):

Categories: Education; Intellectual; Mass Communications; Print Culture; Religion; Social and Cultural; Midwest
Keywords: Mortimer Adler, Mortimer J. Adler, Robert Hutchins, great books*, Paideia, Clifton Fadiman, John Erskine

I used to scan the reviews and books received sections of JAH for new scholarship. Thanks to RSO, now I can simply read the reviews that interest me rather than worry about missing a new title because I don't have the metadata/LOC categories. Otherwise, how would I have known---based on the titles alone---that the books by Bilder et al., Hunt, Kim, Mirra, and Weaver held forth on matters related to intellectual history?

------------------------------
E-mail Update for April 2010
Category: "Intellectual"

Baker, Lee D., Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. xiv, 277 pp. Cloth, $79.95, isbn 978-0-8223-4686-9. Paper, $22.95, isbn 978-0-8223-4698-2.) Document Type: Book
Categories: African American; American Indian; Intellectual; Race

Bilder, Mary Sarah, Maeva Marcus, and R. Kent Newmyer, eds., Blackstone in America: Selected Essays of Kathryn Preyer. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xiv, 287 pp. $85.00, isbn 978-0-521-49087-0.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Gender, Masculinity, and Femininity; Intellectual; Legal and Constitutional; Women

Crowder, Ralph L., “The Historical Context and Political Significance of Harlem’s Street Scholar Community,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 34 (Jan. 2010), 34–71. Document Type: Article
Categories: African American; East; Education; Intellectual; Social and Cultural; Urban and Suburban

Gooding-Williams, Robert, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. xii, 350 pp. $35.00, isbn 978-0-674-03526-3.) Document Type: Book
Categories: African American; Intellectual; Politics; Race

Hunt, Bruce J., Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. x, 182 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 978-0-8018-9358-2. Paper, $20.00, isbn 978-0-8018-9359-9.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Business and Economics; Intellectual; Science and Technology

James, Samuel, “Louis Mink, ‘Postmodernism,’ and the Vocation of Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History, 7 (April 2010), 151–84. Document Type: Article
Categories: Intellectual; Theory and Methodology

Kessler-Harris, Alice, and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., Democracy and Social Rights in the “Two Wests.” (Turin: Otto, 2009. ii, 351 pp. Paper, €25,00, isbn 978-88-95285-16-0.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Intellectual; Politics; Transnational and Comparative

Kester, Scott J., The Haunted Philosophe: James Madison, Republicanism, and Slavery. (Lanham: Lexington, 2008. x, 132 pp. $55.00, isbn 978-0-7391-2174-0.)Document Type: Book
Categories: Intellectual; Politics; Revolutionary and Early National

Kim, Jin Hee, “1930–40 Nyundae Miguk gisikineui daejung munwha insik” (New York intellectuals and mass culture in the 1930s and 1940s), Mikuthak Nonjip/Korean Journal of American Studies, 40 (no. 3, 2008), 5–38. In Korean. Document Type: Article
Categories: East; Intellectual; Social and Cultural; Transnational and Comparative; Urban and Suburban

Mirra, Carl, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2010. xvi, 224 pp. $34.95, isbn 978-1-60635-051-5.) Document Type: Book
Categories: African American; Biography; Education; Intellectual

Martínez, David, “Pulling Down the Clouds: The O’odham Intellectual Tradition during the ‘Time of Famine,’” American Indian Quarterly, 34 (Winter 2010), 1–32. Document Type: Article
Categories: American Indian; Education; Intellectual; Print Culture; Religion; West

Pianko, Noam, “‘The True Liberalism of Zionism’: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism,” American Jewish History, 94 (Dec. 2008), 299–329. Document Type: Article
Categories: Biography; Ethnicity; Intellectual; International Relations; Jewish

Weaver, Gina Marie, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. xviii, 198 pp. Cloth, $75.00, isbn 978-1-4384-2999-1. Paper, $24.95, isbn 978-1-4384-2998-4.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Crime and Violence; Intellectual; Military; Print Culture; Vietnam; Women

Research Issues: JAH's RSO Function And New Works On U.S. Intellectual History

If you don't already take advantage of your JAH subscription to receive what's called an RSO update (Recent Scholarship Online), I would encourage you to do so.

Below is a selection of new books and articles on intellectual history received by JAH since the last RSO update in March. I say "received" because not all of the works were published in 2010. This list has been thinned out a bit because I deleted sublistings of individual contributions from the Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna edited collection.

You can set up your RSO to screen by categories and keywords. Here are mine (reflective of my ongoing projects):

Categories: Education; Intellectual; Mass Communications; Print Culture; Religion; Social and Cultural; Midwest
Keywords: Mortimer Adler, Mortimer J. Adler, Robert Hutchins, great books*, Paideia, Clifton Fadiman, John Erskine

I used to scan the reviews and books received sections of JAH for new scholarship. Thanks to RSO, now I can simply read the reviews that interest me rather than worry about missing a new title because I don't have the metadata/LOC categories. Otherwise, how would I have known---based on the titles alone---that the books by Bilder et al., Hunt, Kim, Mirra, and Weaver held forth on matters related to intellectual history?

------------------------------
E-mail Update for April 2010
Category: "Intellectual"

Baker, Lee D., Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. xiv, 277 pp. Cloth, $79.95, isbn 978-0-8223-4686-9. Paper, $22.95, isbn 978-0-8223-4698-2.) Document Type: Book
Categories: African American; American Indian; Intellectual; Race

Bilder, Mary Sarah, Maeva Marcus, and R. Kent Newmyer, eds., Blackstone in America: Selected Essays of Kathryn Preyer. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xiv, 287 pp. $85.00, isbn 978-0-521-49087-0.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Gender, Masculinity, and Femininity; Intellectual; Legal and Constitutional; Women

Crowder, Ralph L., “The Historical Context and Political Significance of Harlem’s Street Scholar Community,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 34 (Jan. 2010), 34–71. Document Type: Article
Categories: African American; East; Education; Intellectual; Social and Cultural; Urban and Suburban

Gooding-Williams, Robert, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. xii, 350 pp. $35.00, isbn 978-0-674-03526-3.) Document Type: Book
Categories: African American; Intellectual; Politics; Race

Hunt, Bruce J., Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. x, 182 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 978-0-8018-9358-2. Paper, $20.00, isbn 978-0-8018-9359-9.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Business and Economics; Intellectual; Science and Technology

James, Samuel, “Louis Mink, ‘Postmodernism,’ and the Vocation of Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History, 7 (April 2010), 151–84. Document Type: Article
Categories: Intellectual; Theory and Methodology

Kessler-Harris, Alice, and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., Democracy and Social Rights in the “Two Wests.” (Turin: Otto, 2009. ii, 351 pp. Paper, €25,00, isbn 978-88-95285-16-0.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Intellectual; Politics; Transnational and Comparative

Kester, Scott J., The Haunted Philosophe: James Madison, Republicanism, and Slavery. (Lanham: Lexington, 2008. x, 132 pp. $55.00, isbn 978-0-7391-2174-0.)Document Type: Book
Categories: Intellectual; Politics; Revolutionary and Early National

Kim, Jin Hee, “1930–40 Nyundae Miguk gisikineui daejung munwha insik” (New York intellectuals and mass culture in the 1930s and 1940s), Mikuthak Nonjip/Korean Journal of American Studies, 40 (no. 3, 2008), 5–38. In Korean. Document Type: Article
Categories: East; Intellectual; Social and Cultural; Transnational and Comparative; Urban and Suburban

Mirra, Carl, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2010. xvi, 224 pp. $34.95, isbn 978-1-60635-051-5.) Document Type: Book
Categories: African American; Biography; Education; Intellectual

Martínez, David, “Pulling Down the Clouds: The O’odham Intellectual Tradition during the ‘Time of Famine,’” American Indian Quarterly, 34 (Winter 2010), 1–32. Document Type: Article
Categories: American Indian; Education; Intellectual; Print Culture; Religion; West

Pianko, Noam, “‘The True Liberalism of Zionism’: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism,” American Jewish History, 94 (Dec. 2008), 299–329. Document Type: Article
Categories: Biography; Ethnicity; Intellectual; International Relations; Jewish

Weaver, Gina Marie, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. xviii, 198 pp. Cloth, $75.00, isbn 978-1-4384-2999-1. Paper, $24.95, isbn 978-1-4384-2998-4.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Crime and Violence; Intellectual; Military; Print Culture; Vietnam; Women