Hello All,
This is a last-minute call for contributors to a forthcoming two-volume
reference work on the global History of Feminist Thought, to be published by
ABC-CLIO. I am in need of contributors who can write up 1500-word entries
on specific individuals/documents. Approximately 1/2 of the entry is made
up of excerpts from the related primary source document - the remainder of
the brief entry provides biographical and historical context and analysis,
to follow a format predetermined by the press.
In most cases, I have some bibliographic information compiled, but I am
looking for specialists or people with at least enough familiarity to write
about the following:
1. "The Woman's Labour," Mary Collier (England, 1739)
2. History of Woman, or addresses, Callirhoe Parren (Greece, 1890s)
3. The Sultana's Dream, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (Bengal, 1905)
4. "Women's Letters," Bertha Lutz (Brazil, 1918)
5. "Social Conditions among Bantu Women and Girls," Charlotte Manye Maxeke
(south Africa, 1930)
6. My Mission in Life (or other writings), Eva Peron (Argentina, 1953)
7. "Our Path to Emancipation," Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim (Sudan, 1962)
I will provide sample entries and the press will provide a small honorarium
of $50 per entry. Entries must be received BY AUGUST 27th or they cannot be
included in the volume!
Sorry for the short notice. Please forward to interested colleagues, grad
students, writers, scholars.
Tiffany K. Wayne, PhD, project editor
www.womanwriting.com
Jumat, 30 Juli 2010
Call for Contributors: Feminist Thought
Just saw this on H-Net and thought there might be someone in the USIH sphere that would be interested:
Call for Contributors: Feminist Thought
Just saw this on H-Net and thought there might be someone in the USIH sphere that would be interested:
Hello All,
This is a last-minute call for contributors to a forthcoming two-volume
reference work on the global History of Feminist Thought, to be published by
ABC-CLIO. I am in need of contributors who can write up 1500-word entries
on specific individuals/documents. Approximately 1/2 of the entry is made
up of excerpts from the related primary source document - the remainder of
the brief entry provides biographical and historical context and analysis,
to follow a format predetermined by the press.
In most cases, I have some bibliographic information compiled, but I am
looking for specialists or people with at least enough familiarity to write
about the following:
1. "The Woman's Labour," Mary Collier (England, 1739)
2. History of Woman, or addresses, Callirhoe Parren (Greece, 1890s)
3. The Sultana's Dream, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (Bengal, 1905)
4. "Women's Letters," Bertha Lutz (Brazil, 1918)
5. "Social Conditions among Bantu Women and Girls," Charlotte Manye Maxeke
(south Africa, 1930)
6. My Mission in Life (or other writings), Eva Peron (Argentina, 1953)
7. "Our Path to Emancipation," Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim (Sudan, 1962)
I will provide sample entries and the press will provide a small honorarium
of $50 per entry. Entries must be received BY AUGUST 27th or they cannot be
included in the volume!
Sorry for the short notice. Please forward to interested colleagues, grad
students, writers, scholars.
Tiffany K. Wayne, PhD, project editor
www.womanwriting.com
Senin, 26 Juli 2010
Chomsky's [43-year-old] Challenge To Public Intellectuals
As with my last post, I offer another inspirational prompt on the topic of public intellectuals in relation to this fall's USIH conference.
Wisconsin Public Radio's regular program, To The Best of Our Knowledge, hosted Noam Chomsky on June 20, 2010 to discuss his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."
Published on February 23 of that year, as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, Chomsky used the context of the escalating Vietnam War as an opportunity to lambaste the "the cult of the experts" and challenge intellectuals "to speak the truth and to expose lies." In addition, he added, "If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective."
For perceived breaches in the public's trust, Chomsky directed his wrath first at the actions of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, and the "New Frontiersmen" in general. But he also touched on misguided or irresponsible statements made in the public sphere by Irving Kristol, McGeorge Bundy, David N. Rowe, Daniel Bell, and others.
Here's a link to the NPR program. The Chomsky interview occurs during segment one---the 0:00-17:00 minute portion of the show.
Is Chomsky's essay still relevant? Or does the context of Vietnam War negate its effectiveness---rendering it meaningless to today's reader? Does the public today think of intellectuals in terms of truth and lies? Or are public intellectuals just another form of 'infotainment' to today's reading public? Do we only expect irony and/or skepticism from our public intellectuals? - TL
Wisconsin Public Radio's regular program, To The Best of Our Knowledge, hosted Noam Chomsky on June 20, 2010 to discuss his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."
Published on February 23 of that year, as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, Chomsky used the context of the escalating Vietnam War as an opportunity to lambaste the "the cult of the experts" and challenge intellectuals "to speak the truth and to expose lies." In addition, he added, "If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective."
For perceived breaches in the public's trust, Chomsky directed his wrath first at the actions of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, and the "New Frontiersmen" in general. But he also touched on misguided or irresponsible statements made in the public sphere by Irving Kristol, McGeorge Bundy, David N. Rowe, Daniel Bell, and others.
Here's a link to the NPR program. The Chomsky interview occurs during segment one---the 0:00-17:00 minute portion of the show.
Is Chomsky's essay still relevant? Or does the context of Vietnam War negate its effectiveness---rendering it meaningless to today's reader? Does the public today think of intellectuals in terms of truth and lies? Or are public intellectuals just another form of 'infotainment' to today's reading public? Do we only expect irony and/or skepticism from our public intellectuals? - TL
Chomsky's [43-year-old] Challenge To Public Intellectuals
As with my last post, I offer another inspirational prompt on the topic of public intellectuals in relation to this fall's USIH conference.
Wisconsin Public Radio's regular program, To The Best of Our Knowledge, hosted Noam Chomsky on June 20, 2010 to discuss his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."
Published on February 23 of that year, as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, Chomsky used the context of the escalating Vietnam War as an opportunity to lambaste the "the cult of the experts" and challenge intellectuals "to speak the truth and to expose lies." In addition, he added, "If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective."
For perceived breaches in the public's trust, Chomsky directed his wrath first at the actions of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, and the "New Frontiersmen" in general. But he also touched on misguided or irresponsible statements made in the public sphere by Irving Kristol, McGeorge Bundy, David N. Rowe, Daniel Bell, and others.
Here's a link to the NPR program. The Chomsky interview occurs during segment one---the 0:00-17:00 minute portion of the show.
Is Chomsky's essay still relevant? Or does the context of Vietnam War negate its effectiveness---rendering it meaningless to today's reader? Does the public today think of intellectuals in terms of truth and lies? Or are public intellectuals just another form of 'infotainment' to today's reading public? Do we only expect irony and/or skepticism from our public intellectuals? - TL
Wisconsin Public Radio's regular program, To The Best of Our Knowledge, hosted Noam Chomsky on June 20, 2010 to discuss his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."
Published on February 23 of that year, as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, Chomsky used the context of the escalating Vietnam War as an opportunity to lambaste the "the cult of the experts" and challenge intellectuals "to speak the truth and to expose lies." In addition, he added, "If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective."
For perceived breaches in the public's trust, Chomsky directed his wrath first at the actions of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, and the "New Frontiersmen" in general. But he also touched on misguided or irresponsible statements made in the public sphere by Irving Kristol, McGeorge Bundy, David N. Rowe, Daniel Bell, and others.
Here's a link to the NPR program. The Chomsky interview occurs during segment one---the 0:00-17:00 minute portion of the show.
Is Chomsky's essay still relevant? Or does the context of Vietnam War negate its effectiveness---rendering it meaningless to today's reader? Does the public today think of intellectuals in terms of truth and lies? Or are public intellectuals just another form of 'infotainment' to today's reading public? Do we only expect irony and/or skepticism from our public intellectuals? - TL
Senin, 19 Juli 2010
"There was no United States": Bender On Historians And Their Publics
In honor of our USIH 3.0 conference program release, I offer this related essay by Thomas Bender on the role of historians as public intellectuals. Titled "Historians in Public," Bender uses the article to think about the audiences of historians in relation to both historians' particular kinds of expertise and their means of communication. I found this reminder from Bender, appearing early in the essay, to be most worthy (underlining mine):
As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation.
If we follow Zola's prompt, the distinction between an 'intellectual' and a 'scholar' is the starting point for thinking about audiences for intellectuals (their 'publics') in the twentieth century. Words to ponder as we begin thinking through our manuscripts for the fall program.
And here's another passage---with no small implications for USIH as a subfield and its conference (this fall and beyond, underlining mine):
At the time the AHA was founded the overriding cultural and political project was restoring the union. The price of reconciliation was accepting a regime of white terror imposed on black Americans in the former Confederate states. One of the great accomplishments of recent scholarship has been to make this clear.[13] In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives.
Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship. In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole.
Wow. But Bender's essay contains much more. Indeed, we could mine this piece for days. I won't reproduce the rest here, but would be happy to converse about his other points---large and small---in the comments below. - TL
As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation.
If we follow Zola's prompt, the distinction between an 'intellectual' and a 'scholar' is the starting point for thinking about audiences for intellectuals (their 'publics') in the twentieth century. Words to ponder as we begin thinking through our manuscripts for the fall program.
And here's another passage---with no small implications for USIH as a subfield and its conference (this fall and beyond, underlining mine):
At the time the AHA was founded the overriding cultural and political project was restoring the union. The price of reconciliation was accepting a regime of white terror imposed on black Americans in the former Confederate states. One of the great accomplishments of recent scholarship has been to make this clear.[13] In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives.
Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship. In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole.
Wow. But Bender's essay contains much more. Indeed, we could mine this piece for days. I won't reproduce the rest here, but would be happy to converse about his other points---large and small---in the comments below. - TL
"There was no United States": Bender On Historians And Their Publics
In honor of our USIH 3.0 conference program release, I offer this related essay by Thomas Bender on the role of historians as public intellectuals. Titled "Historians in Public," Bender uses the article to think about the audiences of historians in relation to both historians' particular kinds of expertise and their means of communication. I found this reminder from Bender, appearing early in the essay, to be most worthy (underlining mine):
As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation.
If we follow Zola's prompt, the distinction between an 'intellectual' and a 'scholar' is the starting point for thinking about audiences for intellectuals (their 'publics') in the twentieth century. Words to ponder as we begin thinking through our manuscripts for the fall program.
And here's another passage---with no small implications for USIH as a subfield and its conference (this fall and beyond, underlining mine):
At the time the AHA was founded the overriding cultural and political project was restoring the union. The price of reconciliation was accepting a regime of white terror imposed on black Americans in the former Confederate states. One of the great accomplishments of recent scholarship has been to make this clear.[13] In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives.
Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship. In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole.
Wow. But Bender's essay contains much more. Indeed, we could mine this piece for days. I won't reproduce the rest here, but would be happy to converse about his other points---large and small---in the comments below. - TL
As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation.
If we follow Zola's prompt, the distinction between an 'intellectual' and a 'scholar' is the starting point for thinking about audiences for intellectuals (their 'publics') in the twentieth century. Words to ponder as we begin thinking through our manuscripts for the fall program.
And here's another passage---with no small implications for USIH as a subfield and its conference (this fall and beyond, underlining mine):
At the time the AHA was founded the overriding cultural and political project was restoring the union. The price of reconciliation was accepting a regime of white terror imposed on black Americans in the former Confederate states. One of the great accomplishments of recent scholarship has been to make this clear.[13] In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives.
Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship. In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole.
Wow. But Bender's essay contains much more. Indeed, we could mine this piece for days. I won't reproduce the rest here, but would be happy to converse about his other points---large and small---in the comments below. - TL
Kamis, 15 Juli 2010
Program: Third Annual US Intellectual History Conference
Intellectuals and Their Publics
Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center
CUNY
October 21-22, 2010
For information on registration, click here.
PROGRAM
Thursday, October 21, 2010
10:00 am-12:00: Session A
Segal Theatre, Panel 1
Chicago Social Science and American Conservative Thought
Angus Burgin, Johns Hopkins University
Chicago Economists and Free-Market Advocacy during the Great Depression
Robert Thomas, Columbia University
Frank Knight’s Weberian Interventions in the 1930s Crisis of Liberalism
Stephen Turner, University of South Florida
Postwar Chicago and the Americanization of European Liberalism
Commentator: Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
C201, Panel 2
Intellectuals and the Left
Jeffrey B. Perry, Independent Scholar
Hubert Harrison: Harlem's Brilliant, Mass-based, Public Intellectual
Nathan Godfried, University of Maine
Public Intellectuals and the Popular Front: Political Economist J. Raymond Walsh, 1932-1938
Commentator: Mike O’Connor, Georgia State University
C202, Panel 3
A Decent Disrespect: The Opinions of Mankind and the Making of a Modern Republic
Varad Mehta, Independent Scholar
Extinguishing the “Lamp of Experience”: History and Modernity in the American Revolution
Matthew Peterson, Claremont Graduate University
The Purpose of Government in the Rhetoric of Ratification: Promoting the Public Good and Protecting Individual Rights
Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, The George Washington University
The Third Body of Washington: The Presidential Title Controversy & the Collision of Sovereignties
Commentator: Martin Burke, CUNY, The Graduate Center
C203, Panel 4
Church, State, and Law in U.S. Intellectual History
David Sehat, Georgia State University
The Myth of American Religious Freedom
Remalian Cocar, Emory University
Between Liberalism and Evangelicalism: Early 20th-Century Mainline Protestants and Their Public
Christopher Hickman, The George Washington University
“An Unfortunate Metaphor”: Theological Liberals and the Establishment Clause Jurisprudence of the Vinson Court
Ethan Schrum, University of Pennsylvania
Samuel Stumpf and the Conversation between Law and Theology in the Postwar United States
Commentator: Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University
C204, Panel 5
Gendered Public Spheres
Kathryn Troy, Stony Brook University
Contested Modernity: Conflicting Images of Nineteenth Century Women in America
Andrea L. Turpin, University of Notre Dame
Andrew Dickson White vs. Charles William Eliot: Science, Religion, and Class in Debates over Collegiate Coeducation
Susan Lanzoni, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jessie Taft and the Shaping of the Social Self
Linda Przybyszewski, University of Notre Dame
Dressing in Good Taste: Home Economists, Aesthetic Principles, and the Female Student
Commentator: Hilary Hallett, Columbia University
C205, Panel 6
Cross-Atlantic Exchanges: Theory and Pedagogy
Robert Zwarg, University of Leipzig
The Transformation of a Tradition: The American Reception of Critical Theory
Gregory Jones-Katz, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rethinking Deconstruction in America
Dennis R. Bryson, Bilkent University
Teaching U.S. Intellectual History in Turkey
Commentator: Daniel Wickberg, University of Texas-Dallas
1:00-3:00 pm: Session B
Segal Theatre, Panel 7
The Culture Wars as Intellectual History
Whitney Strub, Rutgers University-Newark
The Porno Follies: Intellectuals, Pornography, and the Emergence of the Culture-War Narrative
Allison Perlman, New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers University-Newark
The ‘Burden of Diversity’: Affirmative Action, Media Deregulation, and the Culture Wars
Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University
Moderns Versus Postmoderns: The Culture Wars and the Future of the Left
Commentator: James Livingston, Rutgers University
C201, Panel 8
Ethnicities, Old and New
Michael Mezzano Jr., Wheaton College
The Futility of Criticism: Race, Biology and Immigration Restriction
Richard Moss, Independent Scholar
Ethnic Intellectuals and the Problem of Audience in the 1970s
Alexander Elkins, Temple University
Producing the Ethnic Public: Michael Novak, White Ethnics, and Postwar Political Culture
Commentator: Greg Sumner, University of Detroit Mercy
C202, Panel 9
Neoconservatism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Enduring Arguments, Enduring Provocations
Laurence R. Jurdem, Fordham University
James Burnham, Sidney Hook and the Search for Intellectual Truth from Communism to the Cold War, 1933-1956
Joshua Botts, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
From Nightmares to Dreams: The Evolution of Neoconservative Strategic Culture from 1970 to 2000
John Ehrman, Independent Scholar
Neoconservatism After Iraq: Consistency and Adaptability
Commentator: Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
C203, Panel 10
Defining Liberal Education and Freedom for American Democracy, 1940-1970
Fred Beuttler, U.S. House of Representatives Historian
“Politics as the only School of Liberal Arts”: The Debate over Goals for Education at the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1945-1950
Tim Lacy, Monmouth College
The Meaning of Freedom: Dialectics, Intellectuals, and Democratic Culture during the Cold War
Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
Before the Closing: Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and U.S. Higher Education in the 1960s
Commentator: Rene Arcilla, New York University
C204, Panel 11
Intellectuals and Cold War Policy
Daniel Bessner, Duke University
Bildung, Wissenschaft, and the German Origins of the Defense Intellectual
Barbara J. Falk, Canadian Forces College
Moscow’s Puppets? American Communist Intellectuals and the Construction of Early Cold War Political Discourse
Commentator: Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania
C205, Panel 12
Identity Formation in American History
William Fine, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
Historicizing Identity
Citlali Sosa-Riddell, University of California, Los Angeles
Early Chicano Intellectual Thought: Californios and their Public Efforts to Create a “Native” Identity
Lindsey Wallace, University of Colorado, Boulder
Basil Manly and His Public: Southern Moral Philosophy and “Lived” Religious Experience in the Antebellum Baptist South
Daniel Vandersommers, The Ohio State University
Violence, Animals, and Egalitarianism: Audubon and the Intellectual Formation of Animal Rights in America
Commentator: Gregory Downs, The City College of New York
3:15-5:15 pm: Session C
Segal Theatre, Panel 13
To Serve Mankind: Wars, Faith, and United States Foreign Policy
Angela Lahr, Westminster College
Church, State, and War: Evangelicals, Politics, and the Vietnam War
Christopher McKnight Nichols, University of Pennsylvania
Opposition to Empire and Isolationist Ideas in the United States, 1895-1910
Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University
Bracing for Armageddon: The Global Visions of World War II-Era Evangelicalism
Commentator: Leo P. Ribuffo, The George Washington University
C201, Panel 14
Publics and Their Scientific Intellectuals: The Multitude of Scientific Experts and Their Many Audiences in the 20th-century United States
Sylwester Ratowt, American Philosophical Society
Their Colleagues Rejected Them, but Publics Accepted Them: Public Intellectuals and the Limits of Scientific Professionalization, 1890-1920
Paul Burnett, St. Thomas University
You Can Run Numbers But You Can’t Hide: Agricultural Economists Define the Nature of Their Calling, 1942-52
Audra Wolfe, Independent Scholar
Between Popularization and Policy: Biological Scientists as Public Intellectuals, 1945-1972
Erik Peterson, University of Notre Dame
What Does Gregory Bateson’s Status as a Philosopher for the New Age Have to Do With the Delay on the Synthesis Between Evolutionary and Developmental Biology?
Commentator: Hunter Heyck, University of Oklahoma
C202, Panel 15
Technology, Philosophy, and Film: The Idea of American Cinema from D.W. Griffith to Terrence Malick
Daniel Wuebben, The City College of New York, The Graduate Center
Wire-Cutting and Cross-Cutting: The Telegraph and Tension in the Early Western
Andreas Killen, The City College of New York
Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold-War Subject
Martin Woessner, The City College of New York, Center for Worker Education
The Fourfold on Film: Terrence Malick between Stanley Cavell and Martin Heidegger
Commentator: Marlene Clark, The City College of New York, Center for Worker Education
C203, Panel 16
Varieties of Conservatism, Mid-Twentieth Century
Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University
The New Humanist Controversy and the Conservative-Modernist Split in American Intellectual Life
Seth Bartee, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
The Reactionary Historians: The Rejection of Disciplinary Professionalism and the Problems of Historical Scholarship in Democracy
Emily Dufton, The George Washington University
“Hurrah for Western Civilization!”: Representations of Africa in the Conservative Cultural Imagination
Commentator: Kim Phillips-Fein, New York University-Gallatin
C204, Panel 17
Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Thought
Donna J. Drucker, Indiana State University
“A Most Interesting Chapter in the History of Science”: Intellectual Responses to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
Joseph Malherek, The George Washington University
Market Segmentation as Discursive Deflection: Social Critics and Their Adversaries in Advertising
Edward J.K. Gitre, University of Virginia
Observing the “Ries-man”: The Social Scientific Imagination in Mid-twentieth-century America
Commentator: David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
C205, Panel 18
Fame, Myth-making, Authority, and Public Intellectuals
Ben Wurgaft, The New School
Leo Strauss and the Public Intellectuals
David K. Hecht, Bowdoin College
Rewriting Oppenheimer: Moral Authority and the Public Scientist
Erik M. Greenberg, Autry National Center/UCLA
The American Career of Israel Zangwill: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Fame and the Public Intellectual
Commentator: Robert Westbrook, University of Rochester
6:00-8:00 pm
Segal Theatre
Plenary: Renewing Black Intellectual History
Participants:
Adolph Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania
Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago
Dean E. Robinson, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Touré F. Reed, Illinois State University
Friday, October 22, 2010
10:00 am-12:00: Session D
Segal Theatre, Panel 19
Do-It-Yourself Criticism: Inquiries into Values, 1945-1975
Daniel H. Borus, University of Rochester
The Conspicuous Consumption of Thorstein Veblen, 1945-1960
Lisa Szefel, Pacific University
Peter Viereck’s Mid-Century “New Conservatism”: “Uncautiously Daring, Free-Thinking Lovers of Beauty”
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Philosophy out of Doors: Thinking as a Handicraft and Spiritual Practice in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Commentator: J. David Hoeveler, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
C201, Panel 20
The Intellectuals' Cold War: An Historiographical Challenge
Matthew J. Cotter, CUNY, The Graduate Center
The Philosopher as Heretic: Sidney Hook and Higher Education’s Cold War
Michael Brenes, CUNY, The Graduate Center
From Isolation to Wilsonianism: William F. Buckley and Conservative Internationalism during the Early Cold War
Peter Aigner, CUNY, The Graduate Center
Hannah Arendt’s Revolution
Commentator: Jennifer Delton, Skidmore College
C202, Panel 21
Religion and Early African-American Political Thought
Christopher Cameron, University of North Carolina Charlotte
Puritanism and the Ideological Origins of Black Politics in America
Peter Wirzbicki, New York University
The Adelphic Union, Transcendentalism, and the Creation of a Black Intellectual Life in Antebellum Boston
Molly Oshatz, San Francisco State University
The Antislavery Origins of Historicism in America
Commentator: James Levy, Hofstra University
C203, Panel 22
Americans and the World, 1898-1922
Trygve V. R. Throntveit, Harvard University
A League for the Layperson: Public Intellectuals, Presidential Leadership, and Popular Internationalism in the Era of the Treaty Fight, 1918-1922
Matthew J. Shaughnessy, Marist College
Memory, War and the Judeo-Christian Mission in Lowell Thomas’ Travelogues, 1917-1919
Commentator: Craig A. Daigle, The City College of New York
C204, Panel 23
Aesthetics and Ideas
Gary Grieve-Carlson, Lebanon Valley College
In the Borderlands: American Poetry Engages History
Christina G. Larocco, University of Maryland, College Park
The Art of Politics / The Politics of Art: Tennessee Williams and His Audience
Camelia Lenart, SUNY Albany
Martha Graham and Bethsabee de Rothschild: an Artistic Friendship in the Service of Modern Dance
Valerie Hellstein, Boston College
Paintings All Around You: Paul Goodman, Vanguard Art, and the Abstract Expressionists
Commentator: Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
C205, Panel 24
Civil Religion and U.S. Intellectual History, Roundtable
Participants:
Wendy Wall, Binghamton University
Philip S. Gorski, Yale University
Raymond Haberski, Marian University
Commentator: Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee
12:15-1:15
C201: Special Session: Brown Bag Lunch
Brian Lloyd, University of California, Riverside
When the Audience was in the Streets: Pop Musicians and Political Insurgency in the late-1960s (includes audio presentation)
1:30-3:00 pm
Segal Theatre
Keynote Address
James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition
3:15-5:15: Session E
Segal Theatre, Panel 25
Conservative Influences from the Other Europe: American Conservatism and Eastern Europe
Nancy Sinkoff, Rutgers University
Vilna on My Mind: The Polishness of Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s Turn to Neoconservatism
Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
A Cold Warrior Before the Cold War: Ayn Rand as Russian Intellectual in America
Michael Kimmage, Catholic University
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Emptiness of American Conservatism
Comments: Audience
C201, Panel 26
Social Thought in the Progressive Era
Louise W. Knight, Northwestern University
The Ethical Limits of Rhetoric: Jane Addams and the Arguments for Women’s Suffrage
Richard L. Hughes, Illinois State University
From Jewish Ghetto to “Negro Invasion”: The Contested History of the Black Ghetto during the Progressive Era
Shaun S. Nichols, Harvard University
Creating a New Republic: Progressivism, Pluralism, and the Search for the Public Good, 1908-1930
Neil Jumonville, Florida State University
The Curious Case of Privacy
Commentator: Jackson Lears, Rutgers University
C202, Panel 27
Rock Critics as Public Intellectuals: Mass-Cultural Music Writing From the 60s to the Present
Chair: Nick Bromell, University of Massachusetts
Devon Powers, Drexel University
The Problem of Pop: Rock Criticism, Pop Intellectualism, and Postmodernity
Michael J. Kramer, Northwestern University
Creem Magazine and Rock Criticism's Public Intellectuals After the Sixties Counterculture
Daphne Carr, Columbia University
Lad Mags in the Post-PC Era: Rock Criticism, Gender, and Sexuality, 1990-2010
Commentator: Paul Anderson, University of Michigan
C203, Panel 28
Intellectuals and Rural Life from World War I to the Cold War
Todd Dresser, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Encounters with Carol Kennecott: Rural Sociology and Rural Community Development, 1919-1929
Gabriel Rosenberg, Brown University
'Low Modern’-izing the Family Farm: The Pronatalist Turn in the late-New Deal USDA
Daniel Immerwahr, University of California, Berkeley
Agrarian Intellectuals at Home and Abroad: Decentralism in U.S. Thought and Policy, 1935–1955
Commentator: Andrew Jewett, Harvard University
C204, Panel 29
Racial Politics, Intellectuals, and Academia
Lauren Kientz Anderson, University of Kentucky
Abram Harris’s Identity as an Intellectual and an Academic
Jason Schulman, Emory University
Contingencies of History: Herbert Gutman and the Politics of Family Discourse
Stephen Kercher, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
Academic Intellectuals, Race, and the Impact of Black Student Demonstrations in Wisconsin During the Late 1960s
Carl Pedersen, Copenhagen Business School
The Obama Dilemma: Confronting Race in the 21st Century
Commentator: Jonathan Scott Holloway, Yale University
C205, Panel 30
American Jewish Intellectuals: The “Old Left” and Beyond
Julian Nemeth, Brandeis University
Sidney Hook, Herbert Aptheker, and the Politics of Academic Freedom
David Weinfeld, New York University
Horace Kallen Reconsidered: Cultural Pluralism and Hybridity as Lived Experience
Ronnie Grinberg, University of Colorado, Boulder
An Often Overlooked Conservative: Midge Decter—A 'Scourge of Feminist Dogma’
Commentator: Tony Michels, University of Wisconsin-Madison
7:00-9:00 pm
Elebash Recital Hall
Plenary: Intellectual History for What?
Participants:
George Cotkin, Cal Poly
Rochelle Gurstein, Independent Scholar
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University
Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee
David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center
CUNY
October 21-22, 2010
For information on registration, click here.
PROGRAM
Thursday, October 21, 2010
10:00 am-12:00: Session A
Segal Theatre, Panel 1
Chicago Social Science and American Conservative Thought
Angus Burgin, Johns Hopkins University
Chicago Economists and Free-Market Advocacy during the Great Depression
Robert Thomas, Columbia University
Frank Knight’s Weberian Interventions in the 1930s Crisis of Liberalism
Stephen Turner, University of South Florida
Postwar Chicago and the Americanization of European Liberalism
Commentator: Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
C201, Panel 2
Intellectuals and the Left
Jeffrey B. Perry, Independent Scholar
Hubert Harrison: Harlem's Brilliant, Mass-based, Public Intellectual
Nathan Godfried, University of Maine
Public Intellectuals and the Popular Front: Political Economist J. Raymond Walsh, 1932-1938
Commentator: Mike O’Connor, Georgia State University
C202, Panel 3
A Decent Disrespect: The Opinions of Mankind and the Making of a Modern Republic
Varad Mehta, Independent Scholar
Extinguishing the “Lamp of Experience”: History and Modernity in the American Revolution
Matthew Peterson, Claremont Graduate University
The Purpose of Government in the Rhetoric of Ratification: Promoting the Public Good and Protecting Individual Rights
Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, The George Washington University
The Third Body of Washington: The Presidential Title Controversy & the Collision of Sovereignties
Commentator: Martin Burke, CUNY, The Graduate Center
C203, Panel 4
Church, State, and Law in U.S. Intellectual History
David Sehat, Georgia State University
The Myth of American Religious Freedom
Remalian Cocar, Emory University
Between Liberalism and Evangelicalism: Early 20th-Century Mainline Protestants and Their Public
Christopher Hickman, The George Washington University
“An Unfortunate Metaphor”: Theological Liberals and the Establishment Clause Jurisprudence of the Vinson Court
Ethan Schrum, University of Pennsylvania
Samuel Stumpf and the Conversation between Law and Theology in the Postwar United States
Commentator: Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University
C204, Panel 5
Gendered Public Spheres
Kathryn Troy, Stony Brook University
Contested Modernity: Conflicting Images of Nineteenth Century Women in America
Andrea L. Turpin, University of Notre Dame
Andrew Dickson White vs. Charles William Eliot: Science, Religion, and Class in Debates over Collegiate Coeducation
Susan Lanzoni, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jessie Taft and the Shaping of the Social Self
Linda Przybyszewski, University of Notre Dame
Dressing in Good Taste: Home Economists, Aesthetic Principles, and the Female Student
Commentator: Hilary Hallett, Columbia University
C205, Panel 6
Cross-Atlantic Exchanges: Theory and Pedagogy
Robert Zwarg, University of Leipzig
The Transformation of a Tradition: The American Reception of Critical Theory
Gregory Jones-Katz, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rethinking Deconstruction in America
Dennis R. Bryson, Bilkent University
Teaching U.S. Intellectual History in Turkey
Commentator: Daniel Wickberg, University of Texas-Dallas
1:00-3:00 pm: Session B
Segal Theatre, Panel 7
The Culture Wars as Intellectual History
Whitney Strub, Rutgers University-Newark
The Porno Follies: Intellectuals, Pornography, and the Emergence of the Culture-War Narrative
Allison Perlman, New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers University-Newark
The ‘Burden of Diversity’: Affirmative Action, Media Deregulation, and the Culture Wars
Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University
Moderns Versus Postmoderns: The Culture Wars and the Future of the Left
Commentator: James Livingston, Rutgers University
C201, Panel 8
Ethnicities, Old and New
Michael Mezzano Jr., Wheaton College
The Futility of Criticism: Race, Biology and Immigration Restriction
Richard Moss, Independent Scholar
Ethnic Intellectuals and the Problem of Audience in the 1970s
Alexander Elkins, Temple University
Producing the Ethnic Public: Michael Novak, White Ethnics, and Postwar Political Culture
Commentator: Greg Sumner, University of Detroit Mercy
C202, Panel 9
Neoconservatism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Enduring Arguments, Enduring Provocations
Laurence R. Jurdem, Fordham University
James Burnham, Sidney Hook and the Search for Intellectual Truth from Communism to the Cold War, 1933-1956
Joshua Botts, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
From Nightmares to Dreams: The Evolution of Neoconservative Strategic Culture from 1970 to 2000
John Ehrman, Independent Scholar
Neoconservatism After Iraq: Consistency and Adaptability
Commentator: Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
C203, Panel 10
Defining Liberal Education and Freedom for American Democracy, 1940-1970
Fred Beuttler, U.S. House of Representatives Historian
“Politics as the only School of Liberal Arts”: The Debate over Goals for Education at the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1945-1950
Tim Lacy, Monmouth College
The Meaning of Freedom: Dialectics, Intellectuals, and Democratic Culture during the Cold War
Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
Before the Closing: Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and U.S. Higher Education in the 1960s
Commentator: Rene Arcilla, New York University
C204, Panel 11
Intellectuals and Cold War Policy
Daniel Bessner, Duke University
Bildung, Wissenschaft, and the German Origins of the Defense Intellectual
Barbara J. Falk, Canadian Forces College
Moscow’s Puppets? American Communist Intellectuals and the Construction of Early Cold War Political Discourse
Commentator: Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania
C205, Panel 12
Identity Formation in American History
William Fine, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
Historicizing Identity
Citlali Sosa-Riddell, University of California, Los Angeles
Early Chicano Intellectual Thought: Californios and their Public Efforts to Create a “Native” Identity
Lindsey Wallace, University of Colorado, Boulder
Basil Manly and His Public: Southern Moral Philosophy and “Lived” Religious Experience in the Antebellum Baptist South
Daniel Vandersommers, The Ohio State University
Violence, Animals, and Egalitarianism: Audubon and the Intellectual Formation of Animal Rights in America
Commentator: Gregory Downs, The City College of New York
3:15-5:15 pm: Session C
Segal Theatre, Panel 13
To Serve Mankind: Wars, Faith, and United States Foreign Policy
Angela Lahr, Westminster College
Church, State, and War: Evangelicals, Politics, and the Vietnam War
Christopher McKnight Nichols, University of Pennsylvania
Opposition to Empire and Isolationist Ideas in the United States, 1895-1910
Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University
Bracing for Armageddon: The Global Visions of World War II-Era Evangelicalism
Commentator: Leo P. Ribuffo, The George Washington University
C201, Panel 14
Publics and Their Scientific Intellectuals: The Multitude of Scientific Experts and Their Many Audiences in the 20th-century United States
Sylwester Ratowt, American Philosophical Society
Their Colleagues Rejected Them, but Publics Accepted Them: Public Intellectuals and the Limits of Scientific Professionalization, 1890-1920
Paul Burnett, St. Thomas University
You Can Run Numbers But You Can’t Hide: Agricultural Economists Define the Nature of Their Calling, 1942-52
Audra Wolfe, Independent Scholar
Between Popularization and Policy: Biological Scientists as Public Intellectuals, 1945-1972
Erik Peterson, University of Notre Dame
What Does Gregory Bateson’s Status as a Philosopher for the New Age Have to Do With the Delay on the Synthesis Between Evolutionary and Developmental Biology?
Commentator: Hunter Heyck, University of Oklahoma
C202, Panel 15
Technology, Philosophy, and Film: The Idea of American Cinema from D.W. Griffith to Terrence Malick
Daniel Wuebben, The City College of New York, The Graduate Center
Wire-Cutting and Cross-Cutting: The Telegraph and Tension in the Early Western
Andreas Killen, The City College of New York
Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold-War Subject
Martin Woessner, The City College of New York, Center for Worker Education
The Fourfold on Film: Terrence Malick between Stanley Cavell and Martin Heidegger
Commentator: Marlene Clark, The City College of New York, Center for Worker Education
C203, Panel 16
Varieties of Conservatism, Mid-Twentieth Century
Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University
The New Humanist Controversy and the Conservative-Modernist Split in American Intellectual Life
Seth Bartee, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
The Reactionary Historians: The Rejection of Disciplinary Professionalism and the Problems of Historical Scholarship in Democracy
Emily Dufton, The George Washington University
“Hurrah for Western Civilization!”: Representations of Africa in the Conservative Cultural Imagination
Commentator: Kim Phillips-Fein, New York University-Gallatin
C204, Panel 17
Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Thought
Donna J. Drucker, Indiana State University
“A Most Interesting Chapter in the History of Science”: Intellectual Responses to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
Joseph Malherek, The George Washington University
Market Segmentation as Discursive Deflection: Social Critics and Their Adversaries in Advertising
Edward J.K. Gitre, University of Virginia
Observing the “Ries-man”: The Social Scientific Imagination in Mid-twentieth-century America
Commentator: David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
C205, Panel 18
Fame, Myth-making, Authority, and Public Intellectuals
Ben Wurgaft, The New School
Leo Strauss and the Public Intellectuals
David K. Hecht, Bowdoin College
Rewriting Oppenheimer: Moral Authority and the Public Scientist
Erik M. Greenberg, Autry National Center/UCLA
The American Career of Israel Zangwill: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Fame and the Public Intellectual
Commentator: Robert Westbrook, University of Rochester
6:00-8:00 pm
Segal Theatre
Plenary: Renewing Black Intellectual History
Participants:
Adolph Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania
Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago
Dean E. Robinson, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Touré F. Reed, Illinois State University
Friday, October 22, 2010
10:00 am-12:00: Session D
Segal Theatre, Panel 19
Do-It-Yourself Criticism: Inquiries into Values, 1945-1975
Daniel H. Borus, University of Rochester
The Conspicuous Consumption of Thorstein Veblen, 1945-1960
Lisa Szefel, Pacific University
Peter Viereck’s Mid-Century “New Conservatism”: “Uncautiously Daring, Free-Thinking Lovers of Beauty”
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Philosophy out of Doors: Thinking as a Handicraft and Spiritual Practice in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Commentator: J. David Hoeveler, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
C201, Panel 20
The Intellectuals' Cold War: An Historiographical Challenge
Matthew J. Cotter, CUNY, The Graduate Center
The Philosopher as Heretic: Sidney Hook and Higher Education’s Cold War
Michael Brenes, CUNY, The Graduate Center
From Isolation to Wilsonianism: William F. Buckley and Conservative Internationalism during the Early Cold War
Peter Aigner, CUNY, The Graduate Center
Hannah Arendt’s Revolution
Commentator: Jennifer Delton, Skidmore College
C202, Panel 21
Religion and Early African-American Political Thought
Christopher Cameron, University of North Carolina Charlotte
Puritanism and the Ideological Origins of Black Politics in America
Peter Wirzbicki, New York University
The Adelphic Union, Transcendentalism, and the Creation of a Black Intellectual Life in Antebellum Boston
Molly Oshatz, San Francisco State University
The Antislavery Origins of Historicism in America
Commentator: James Levy, Hofstra University
C203, Panel 22
Americans and the World, 1898-1922
Trygve V. R. Throntveit, Harvard University
A League for the Layperson: Public Intellectuals, Presidential Leadership, and Popular Internationalism in the Era of the Treaty Fight, 1918-1922
Matthew J. Shaughnessy, Marist College
Memory, War and the Judeo-Christian Mission in Lowell Thomas’ Travelogues, 1917-1919
Commentator: Craig A. Daigle, The City College of New York
C204, Panel 23
Aesthetics and Ideas
Gary Grieve-Carlson, Lebanon Valley College
In the Borderlands: American Poetry Engages History
Christina G. Larocco, University of Maryland, College Park
The Art of Politics / The Politics of Art: Tennessee Williams and His Audience
Camelia Lenart, SUNY Albany
Martha Graham and Bethsabee de Rothschild: an Artistic Friendship in the Service of Modern Dance
Valerie Hellstein, Boston College
Paintings All Around You: Paul Goodman, Vanguard Art, and the Abstract Expressionists
Commentator: Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
C205, Panel 24
Civil Religion and U.S. Intellectual History, Roundtable
Participants:
Wendy Wall, Binghamton University
Philip S. Gorski, Yale University
Raymond Haberski, Marian University
Commentator: Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee
12:15-1:15
C201: Special Session: Brown Bag Lunch
Brian Lloyd, University of California, Riverside
When the Audience was in the Streets: Pop Musicians and Political Insurgency in the late-1960s (includes audio presentation)
1:30-3:00 pm
Segal Theatre
Keynote Address
James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition
3:15-5:15: Session E
Segal Theatre, Panel 25
Conservative Influences from the Other Europe: American Conservatism and Eastern Europe
Nancy Sinkoff, Rutgers University
Vilna on My Mind: The Polishness of Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s Turn to Neoconservatism
Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
A Cold Warrior Before the Cold War: Ayn Rand as Russian Intellectual in America
Michael Kimmage, Catholic University
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Emptiness of American Conservatism
Comments: Audience
C201, Panel 26
Social Thought in the Progressive Era
Louise W. Knight, Northwestern University
The Ethical Limits of Rhetoric: Jane Addams and the Arguments for Women’s Suffrage
Richard L. Hughes, Illinois State University
From Jewish Ghetto to “Negro Invasion”: The Contested History of the Black Ghetto during the Progressive Era
Shaun S. Nichols, Harvard University
Creating a New Republic: Progressivism, Pluralism, and the Search for the Public Good, 1908-1930
Neil Jumonville, Florida State University
The Curious Case of Privacy
Commentator: Jackson Lears, Rutgers University
C202, Panel 27
Rock Critics as Public Intellectuals: Mass-Cultural Music Writing From the 60s to the Present
Chair: Nick Bromell, University of Massachusetts
Devon Powers, Drexel University
The Problem of Pop: Rock Criticism, Pop Intellectualism, and Postmodernity
Michael J. Kramer, Northwestern University
Creem Magazine and Rock Criticism's Public Intellectuals After the Sixties Counterculture
Daphne Carr, Columbia University
Lad Mags in the Post-PC Era: Rock Criticism, Gender, and Sexuality, 1990-2010
Commentator: Paul Anderson, University of Michigan
C203, Panel 28
Intellectuals and Rural Life from World War I to the Cold War
Todd Dresser, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Encounters with Carol Kennecott: Rural Sociology and Rural Community Development, 1919-1929
Gabriel Rosenberg, Brown University
'Low Modern’-izing the Family Farm: The Pronatalist Turn in the late-New Deal USDA
Daniel Immerwahr, University of California, Berkeley
Agrarian Intellectuals at Home and Abroad: Decentralism in U.S. Thought and Policy, 1935–1955
Commentator: Andrew Jewett, Harvard University
C204, Panel 29
Racial Politics, Intellectuals, and Academia
Lauren Kientz Anderson, University of Kentucky
Abram Harris’s Identity as an Intellectual and an Academic
Jason Schulman, Emory University
Contingencies of History: Herbert Gutman and the Politics of Family Discourse
Stephen Kercher, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
Academic Intellectuals, Race, and the Impact of Black Student Demonstrations in Wisconsin During the Late 1960s
Carl Pedersen, Copenhagen Business School
The Obama Dilemma: Confronting Race in the 21st Century
Commentator: Jonathan Scott Holloway, Yale University
C205, Panel 30
American Jewish Intellectuals: The “Old Left” and Beyond
Julian Nemeth, Brandeis University
Sidney Hook, Herbert Aptheker, and the Politics of Academic Freedom
David Weinfeld, New York University
Horace Kallen Reconsidered: Cultural Pluralism and Hybridity as Lived Experience
Ronnie Grinberg, University of Colorado, Boulder
An Often Overlooked Conservative: Midge Decter—A 'Scourge of Feminist Dogma’
Commentator: Tony Michels, University of Wisconsin-Madison
7:00-9:00 pm
Elebash Recital Hall
Plenary: Intellectual History for What?
Participants:
George Cotkin, Cal Poly
Rochelle Gurstein, Independent Scholar
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University
Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee
David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
Program: Third Annual US Intellectual History Conference
Intellectuals and Their Publics
Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center
CUNY
October 21-22, 2010
For information on registration, click here.
PROGRAM
Thursday, October 21, 2010
10:00 am-12:00: Session A
Segal Theatre, Panel 1
Chicago Social Science and American Conservative Thought
Angus Burgin, Johns Hopkins University
Chicago Economists and Free-Market Advocacy during the Great Depression
Robert Thomas, Columbia University
Frank Knight’s Weberian Interventions in the 1930s Crisis of Liberalism
Stephen Turner, University of South Florida
Postwar Chicago and the Americanization of European Liberalism
Commentator: Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
C201, Panel 2
Intellectuals and the Left
Jeffrey B. Perry, Independent Scholar
Hubert Harrison: Harlem's Brilliant, Mass-based, Public Intellectual
Nathan Godfried, University of Maine
Public Intellectuals and the Popular Front: Political Economist J. Raymond Walsh, 1932-1938
Commentator: Mike O’Connor, Georgia State University
C202, Panel 3
A Decent Disrespect: The Opinions of Mankind and the Making of a Modern Republic
Varad Mehta, Independent Scholar
Extinguishing the “Lamp of Experience”: History and Modernity in the American Revolution
Matthew Peterson, Claremont Graduate University
The Purpose of Government in the Rhetoric of Ratification: Promoting the Public Good and Protecting Individual Rights
Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, The George Washington University
The Third Body of Washington: The Presidential Title Controversy & the Collision of Sovereignties
Commentator: Martin Burke, CUNY, The Graduate Center
C203, Panel 4
Church, State, and Law in U.S. Intellectual History
David Sehat, Georgia State University
The Myth of American Religious Freedom
Remalian Cocar, Emory University
Between Liberalism and Evangelicalism: Early 20th-Century Mainline Protestants and Their Public
Christopher Hickman, The George Washington University
“An Unfortunate Metaphor”: Theological Liberals and the Establishment Clause Jurisprudence of the Vinson Court
Ethan Schrum, University of Pennsylvania
Samuel Stumpf and the Conversation between Law and Theology in the Postwar United States
Commentator: Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University
C204, Panel 5
Gendered Public Spheres
Kathryn Troy, Stony Brook University
Contested Modernity: Conflicting Images of Nineteenth Century Women in America
Andrea L. Turpin, University of Notre Dame
Andrew Dickson White vs. Charles William Eliot: Science, Religion, and Class in Debates over Collegiate Coeducation
Susan Lanzoni, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jessie Taft and the Shaping of the Social Self
Linda Przybyszewski, University of Notre Dame
Dressing in Good Taste: Home Economists, Aesthetic Principles, and the Female Student
Commentator: Hilary Hallett, Columbia University
C205, Panel 6
Cross-Atlantic Exchanges: Theory and Pedagogy
Robert Zwarg, University of Leipzig
The Transformation of a Tradition: The American Reception of Critical Theory
Gregory Jones-Katz, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rethinking Deconstruction in America
Dennis R. Bryson, Bilkent University
Teaching U.S. Intellectual History in Turkey
Commentator: Daniel Wickberg, University of Texas-Dallas
1:00-3:00 pm: Session B
Segal Theatre, Panel 7
The Culture Wars as Intellectual History
Whitney Strub, Rutgers University-Newark
The Porno Follies: Intellectuals, Pornography, and the Emergence of the Culture-War Narrative
Allison Perlman, New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers University-Newark
The ‘Burden of Diversity’: Affirmative Action, Media Deregulation, and the Culture Wars
Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University
Moderns Versus Postmoderns: The Culture Wars and the Future of the Left
Commentator: James Livingston, Rutgers University
C201, Panel 8
Ethnicities, Old and New
Michael Mezzano Jr., Wheaton College
The Futility of Criticism: Race, Biology and Immigration Restriction
Richard Moss, Independent Scholar
Ethnic Intellectuals and the Problem of Audience in the 1970s
Alexander Elkins, Temple University
Producing the Ethnic Public: Michael Novak, White Ethnics, and Postwar Political Culture
Commentator: Greg Sumner, University of Detroit Mercy
C202, Panel 9
Neoconservatism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Enduring Arguments, Enduring Provocations
Laurence R. Jurdem, Fordham University
James Burnham, Sidney Hook and the Search for Intellectual Truth from Communism to the Cold War, 1933-1956
Joshua Botts, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
From Nightmares to Dreams: The Evolution of Neoconservative Strategic Culture from 1970 to 2000
John Ehrman, Independent Scholar
Neoconservatism After Iraq: Consistency and Adaptability
Commentator: Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
C203, Panel 10
Defining Liberal Education and Freedom for American Democracy, 1940-1970
Fred Beuttler, U.S. House of Representatives Historian
“Politics as the only School of Liberal Arts”: The Debate over Goals for Education at the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1945-1950
Tim Lacy, Monmouth College
The Meaning of Freedom: Dialectics, Intellectuals, and Democratic Culture during the Cold War
Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
Before the Closing: Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and U.S. Higher Education in the 1960s
Commentator: Rene Arcilla, New York University
C204, Panel 11
Intellectuals and Cold War Policy
Daniel Bessner, Duke University
Bildung, Wissenschaft, and the German Origins of the Defense Intellectual
Barbara J. Falk, Canadian Forces College
Moscow’s Puppets? American Communist Intellectuals and the Construction of Early Cold War Political Discourse
Commentator: Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania
C205, Panel 12
Identity Formation in American History
William Fine, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
Historicizing Identity
Citlali Sosa-Riddell, University of California, Los Angeles
Early Chicano Intellectual Thought: Californios and their Public Efforts to Create a “Native” Identity
Lindsey Wallace, University of Colorado, Boulder
Basil Manly and His Public: Southern Moral Philosophy and “Lived” Religious Experience in the Antebellum Baptist South
Daniel Vandersommers, The Ohio State University
Violence, Animals, and Egalitarianism: Audubon and the Intellectual Formation of Animal Rights in America
Commentator: Gregory Downs, The City College of New York
3:15-5:15 pm: Session C
Segal Theatre, Panel 13
To Serve Mankind: Wars, Faith, and United States Foreign Policy
Angela Lahr, Westminster College
Church, State, and War: Evangelicals, Politics, and the Vietnam War
Christopher McKnight Nichols, University of Pennsylvania
Opposition to Empire and Isolationist Ideas in the United States, 1895-1910
Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University
Bracing for Armageddon: The Global Visions of World War II-Era Evangelicalism
Commentator: Leo P. Ribuffo, The George Washington University
C201, Panel 14
Publics and Their Scientific Intellectuals: The Multitude of Scientific Experts and Their Many Audiences in the 20th-century United States
Sylwester Ratowt, American Philosophical Society
Their Colleagues Rejected Them, but Publics Accepted Them: Public Intellectuals and the Limits of Scientific Professionalization, 1890-1920
Paul Burnett, St. Thomas University
You Can Run Numbers But You Can’t Hide: Agricultural Economists Define the Nature of Their Calling, 1942-52
Audra Wolfe, Independent Scholar
Between Popularization and Policy: Biological Scientists as Public Intellectuals, 1945-1972
Erik Peterson, University of Notre Dame
What Does Gregory Bateson’s Status as a Philosopher for the New Age Have to Do With the Delay on the Synthesis Between Evolutionary and Developmental Biology?
Commentator: Hunter Heyck, University of Oklahoma
C202, Panel 15
Technology, Philosophy, and Film: The Idea of American Cinema from D.W. Griffith to Terrence Malick
Daniel Wuebben, The City College of New York, The Graduate Center
Wire-Cutting and Cross-Cutting: The Telegraph and Tension in the Early Western
Andreas Killen, The City College of New York
Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold-War Subject
Martin Woessner, The City College of New York, Center for Worker Education
The Fourfold on Film: Terrence Malick between Stanley Cavell and Martin Heidegger
Commentator: Marlene Clark, The City College of New York, Center for Worker Education
C203, Panel 16
Varieties of Conservatism, Mid-Twentieth Century
Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University
The New Humanist Controversy and the Conservative-Modernist Split in American Intellectual Life
Seth Bartee, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
The Reactionary Historians: The Rejection of Disciplinary Professionalism and the Problems of Historical Scholarship in Democracy
Emily Dufton, The George Washington University
“Hurrah for Western Civilization!”: Representations of Africa in the Conservative Cultural Imagination
Commentator: Kim Phillips-Fein, New York University-Gallatin
C204, Panel 17
Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Thought
Donna J. Drucker, Indiana State University
“A Most Interesting Chapter in the History of Science”: Intellectual Responses to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
Joseph Malherek, The George Washington University
Market Segmentation as Discursive Deflection: Social Critics and Their Adversaries in Advertising
Edward J.K. Gitre, University of Virginia
Observing the “Ries-man”: The Social Scientific Imagination in Mid-twentieth-century America
Commentator: David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
C205, Panel 18
Fame, Myth-making, Authority, and Public Intellectuals
Ben Wurgaft, The New School
Leo Strauss and the Public Intellectuals
David K. Hecht, Bowdoin College
Rewriting Oppenheimer: Moral Authority and the Public Scientist
Erik M. Greenberg, Autry National Center/UCLA
The American Career of Israel Zangwill: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Fame and the Public Intellectual
Commentator: Robert Westbrook, University of Rochester
6:00-8:00 pm
Segal Theatre
Plenary: Renewing Black Intellectual History
Participants:
Adolph Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania
Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago
Dean E. Robinson, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Touré F. Reed, Illinois State University
Friday, October 22, 2010
10:00 am-12:00: Session D
Segal Theatre, Panel 19
Do-It-Yourself Criticism: Inquiries into Values, 1945-1975
Daniel H. Borus, University of Rochester
The Conspicuous Consumption of Thorstein Veblen, 1945-1960
Lisa Szefel, Pacific University
Peter Viereck’s Mid-Century “New Conservatism”: “Uncautiously Daring, Free-Thinking Lovers of Beauty”
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Philosophy out of Doors: Thinking as a Handicraft and Spiritual Practice in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Commentator: J. David Hoeveler, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
C201, Panel 20
The Intellectuals' Cold War: An Historiographical Challenge
Matthew J. Cotter, CUNY, The Graduate Center
The Philosopher as Heretic: Sidney Hook and Higher Education’s Cold War
Michael Brenes, CUNY, The Graduate Center
From Isolation to Wilsonianism: William F. Buckley and Conservative Internationalism during the Early Cold War
Peter Aigner, CUNY, The Graduate Center
Hannah Arendt’s Revolution
Commentator: Jennifer Delton, Skidmore College
C202, Panel 21
Religion and Early African-American Political Thought
Christopher Cameron, University of North Carolina Charlotte
Puritanism and the Ideological Origins of Black Politics in America
Peter Wirzbicki, New York University
The Adelphic Union, Transcendentalism, and the Creation of a Black Intellectual Life in Antebellum Boston
Molly Oshatz, San Francisco State University
The Antislavery Origins of Historicism in America
Commentator: James Levy, Hofstra University
C203, Panel 22
Americans and the World, 1898-1922
Trygve V. R. Throntveit, Harvard University
A League for the Layperson: Public Intellectuals, Presidential Leadership, and Popular Internationalism in the Era of the Treaty Fight, 1918-1922
Matthew J. Shaughnessy, Marist College
Memory, War and the Judeo-Christian Mission in Lowell Thomas’ Travelogues, 1917-1919
Commentator: Craig A. Daigle, The City College of New York
C204, Panel 23
Aesthetics and Ideas
Gary Grieve-Carlson, Lebanon Valley College
In the Borderlands: American Poetry Engages History
Christina G. Larocco, University of Maryland, College Park
The Art of Politics / The Politics of Art: Tennessee Williams and His Audience
Camelia Lenart, SUNY Albany
Martha Graham and Bethsabee de Rothschild: an Artistic Friendship in the Service of Modern Dance
Valerie Hellstein, Boston College
Paintings All Around You: Paul Goodman, Vanguard Art, and the Abstract Expressionists
Commentator: Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
C205, Panel 24
Civil Religion and U.S. Intellectual History, Roundtable
Participants:
Wendy Wall, Binghamton University
Philip S. Gorski, Yale University
Raymond Haberski, Marian University
Commentator: Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee
12:15-1:15
C201: Special Session: Brown Bag Lunch
Brian Lloyd, University of California, Riverside
When the Audience was in the Streets: Pop Musicians and Political Insurgency in the late-1960s (includes audio presentation)
1:30-3:00 pm
Segal Theatre
Keynote Address
James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition
3:15-5:15: Session E
Segal Theatre, Panel 25
Conservative Influences from the Other Europe: American Conservatism and Eastern Europe
Nancy Sinkoff, Rutgers University
Vilna on My Mind: The Polishness of Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s Turn to Neoconservatism
Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
A Cold Warrior Before the Cold War: Ayn Rand as Russian Intellectual in America
Michael Kimmage, Catholic University
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Emptiness of American Conservatism
Comments: Audience
C201, Panel 26
Social Thought in the Progressive Era
Louise W. Knight, Northwestern University
The Ethical Limits of Rhetoric: Jane Addams and the Arguments for Women’s Suffrage
Richard L. Hughes, Illinois State University
From Jewish Ghetto to “Negro Invasion”: The Contested History of the Black Ghetto during the Progressive Era
Shaun S. Nichols, Harvard University
Creating a New Republic: Progressivism, Pluralism, and the Search for the Public Good, 1908-1930
Neil Jumonville, Florida State University
The Curious Case of Privacy
Commentator: Jackson Lears, Rutgers University
C202, Panel 27
Rock Critics as Public Intellectuals: Mass-Cultural Music Writing From the 60s to the Present
Chair: Nick Bromell, University of Massachusetts
Devon Powers, Drexel University
The Problem of Pop: Rock Criticism, Pop Intellectualism, and Postmodernity
Michael J. Kramer, Northwestern University
Creem Magazine and Rock Criticism's Public Intellectuals After the Sixties Counterculture
Daphne Carr, Columbia University
Lad Mags in the Post-PC Era: Rock Criticism, Gender, and Sexuality, 1990-2010
Commentator: Paul Anderson, University of Michigan
C203, Panel 28
Intellectuals and Rural Life from World War I to the Cold War
Todd Dresser, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Encounters with Carol Kennecott: Rural Sociology and Rural Community Development, 1919-1929
Gabriel Rosenberg, Brown University
'Low Modern’-izing the Family Farm: The Pronatalist Turn in the late-New Deal USDA
Daniel Immerwahr, University of California, Berkeley
Agrarian Intellectuals at Home and Abroad: Decentralism in U.S. Thought and Policy, 1935–1955
Commentator: Andrew Jewett, Harvard University
C204, Panel 29
Racial Politics, Intellectuals, and Academia
Lauren Kientz Anderson, University of Kentucky
Abram Harris’s Identity as an Intellectual and an Academic
Jason Schulman, Emory University
Contingencies of History: Herbert Gutman and the Politics of Family Discourse
Stephen Kercher, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
Academic Intellectuals, Race, and the Impact of Black Student Demonstrations in Wisconsin During the Late 1960s
Carl Pedersen, Copenhagen Business School
The Obama Dilemma: Confronting Race in the 21st Century
Commentator: Jonathan Scott Holloway, Yale University
C205, Panel 30
American Jewish Intellectuals: The “Old Left” and Beyond
Julian Nemeth, Brandeis University
Sidney Hook, Herbert Aptheker, and the Politics of Academic Freedom
David Weinfeld, New York University
Horace Kallen Reconsidered: Cultural Pluralism and Hybridity as Lived Experience
Ronnie Grinberg, University of Colorado, Boulder
An Often Overlooked Conservative: Midge Decter—A 'Scourge of Feminist Dogma’
Commentator: Tony Michels, University of Wisconsin-Madison
7:00-9:00 pm
Elebash Recital Hall
Plenary: Intellectual History for What?
Participants:
George Cotkin, Cal Poly
Rochelle Gurstein, Independent Scholar
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University
Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee
David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center
CUNY
October 21-22, 2010
For information on registration, click here.
PROGRAM
Thursday, October 21, 2010
10:00 am-12:00: Session A
Segal Theatre, Panel 1
Chicago Social Science and American Conservative Thought
Angus Burgin, Johns Hopkins University
Chicago Economists and Free-Market Advocacy during the Great Depression
Robert Thomas, Columbia University
Frank Knight’s Weberian Interventions in the 1930s Crisis of Liberalism
Stephen Turner, University of South Florida
Postwar Chicago and the Americanization of European Liberalism
Commentator: Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
C201, Panel 2
Intellectuals and the Left
Jeffrey B. Perry, Independent Scholar
Hubert Harrison: Harlem's Brilliant, Mass-based, Public Intellectual
Nathan Godfried, University of Maine
Public Intellectuals and the Popular Front: Political Economist J. Raymond Walsh, 1932-1938
Commentator: Mike O’Connor, Georgia State University
C202, Panel 3
A Decent Disrespect: The Opinions of Mankind and the Making of a Modern Republic
Varad Mehta, Independent Scholar
Extinguishing the “Lamp of Experience”: History and Modernity in the American Revolution
Matthew Peterson, Claremont Graduate University
The Purpose of Government in the Rhetoric of Ratification: Promoting the Public Good and Protecting Individual Rights
Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, The George Washington University
The Third Body of Washington: The Presidential Title Controversy & the Collision of Sovereignties
Commentator: Martin Burke, CUNY, The Graduate Center
C203, Panel 4
Church, State, and Law in U.S. Intellectual History
David Sehat, Georgia State University
The Myth of American Religious Freedom
Remalian Cocar, Emory University
Between Liberalism and Evangelicalism: Early 20th-Century Mainline Protestants and Their Public
Christopher Hickman, The George Washington University
“An Unfortunate Metaphor”: Theological Liberals and the Establishment Clause Jurisprudence of the Vinson Court
Ethan Schrum, University of Pennsylvania
Samuel Stumpf and the Conversation between Law and Theology in the Postwar United States
Commentator: Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University
C204, Panel 5
Gendered Public Spheres
Kathryn Troy, Stony Brook University
Contested Modernity: Conflicting Images of Nineteenth Century Women in America
Andrea L. Turpin, University of Notre Dame
Andrew Dickson White vs. Charles William Eliot: Science, Religion, and Class in Debates over Collegiate Coeducation
Susan Lanzoni, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jessie Taft and the Shaping of the Social Self
Linda Przybyszewski, University of Notre Dame
Dressing in Good Taste: Home Economists, Aesthetic Principles, and the Female Student
Commentator: Hilary Hallett, Columbia University
C205, Panel 6
Cross-Atlantic Exchanges: Theory and Pedagogy
Robert Zwarg, University of Leipzig
The Transformation of a Tradition: The American Reception of Critical Theory
Gregory Jones-Katz, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rethinking Deconstruction in America
Dennis R. Bryson, Bilkent University
Teaching U.S. Intellectual History in Turkey
Commentator: Daniel Wickberg, University of Texas-Dallas
1:00-3:00 pm: Session B
Segal Theatre, Panel 7
The Culture Wars as Intellectual History
Whitney Strub, Rutgers University-Newark
The Porno Follies: Intellectuals, Pornography, and the Emergence of the Culture-War Narrative
Allison Perlman, New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers University-Newark
The ‘Burden of Diversity’: Affirmative Action, Media Deregulation, and the Culture Wars
Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University
Moderns Versus Postmoderns: The Culture Wars and the Future of the Left
Commentator: James Livingston, Rutgers University
C201, Panel 8
Ethnicities, Old and New
Michael Mezzano Jr., Wheaton College
The Futility of Criticism: Race, Biology and Immigration Restriction
Richard Moss, Independent Scholar
Ethnic Intellectuals and the Problem of Audience in the 1970s
Alexander Elkins, Temple University
Producing the Ethnic Public: Michael Novak, White Ethnics, and Postwar Political Culture
Commentator: Greg Sumner, University of Detroit Mercy
C202, Panel 9
Neoconservatism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Enduring Arguments, Enduring Provocations
Laurence R. Jurdem, Fordham University
James Burnham, Sidney Hook and the Search for Intellectual Truth from Communism to the Cold War, 1933-1956
Joshua Botts, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
From Nightmares to Dreams: The Evolution of Neoconservative Strategic Culture from 1970 to 2000
John Ehrman, Independent Scholar
Neoconservatism After Iraq: Consistency and Adaptability
Commentator: Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
C203, Panel 10
Defining Liberal Education and Freedom for American Democracy, 1940-1970
Fred Beuttler, U.S. House of Representatives Historian
“Politics as the only School of Liberal Arts”: The Debate over Goals for Education at the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1945-1950
Tim Lacy, Monmouth College
The Meaning of Freedom: Dialectics, Intellectuals, and Democratic Culture during the Cold War
Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
Before the Closing: Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and U.S. Higher Education in the 1960s
Commentator: Rene Arcilla, New York University
C204, Panel 11
Intellectuals and Cold War Policy
Daniel Bessner, Duke University
Bildung, Wissenschaft, and the German Origins of the Defense Intellectual
Barbara J. Falk, Canadian Forces College
Moscow’s Puppets? American Communist Intellectuals and the Construction of Early Cold War Political Discourse
Commentator: Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania
C205, Panel 12
Identity Formation in American History
William Fine, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
Historicizing Identity
Citlali Sosa-Riddell, University of California, Los Angeles
Early Chicano Intellectual Thought: Californios and their Public Efforts to Create a “Native” Identity
Lindsey Wallace, University of Colorado, Boulder
Basil Manly and His Public: Southern Moral Philosophy and “Lived” Religious Experience in the Antebellum Baptist South
Daniel Vandersommers, The Ohio State University
Violence, Animals, and Egalitarianism: Audubon and the Intellectual Formation of Animal Rights in America
Commentator: Gregory Downs, The City College of New York
3:15-5:15 pm: Session C
Segal Theatre, Panel 13
To Serve Mankind: Wars, Faith, and United States Foreign Policy
Angela Lahr, Westminster College
Church, State, and War: Evangelicals, Politics, and the Vietnam War
Christopher McKnight Nichols, University of Pennsylvania
Opposition to Empire and Isolationist Ideas in the United States, 1895-1910
Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University
Bracing for Armageddon: The Global Visions of World War II-Era Evangelicalism
Commentator: Leo P. Ribuffo, The George Washington University
C201, Panel 14
Publics and Their Scientific Intellectuals: The Multitude of Scientific Experts and Their Many Audiences in the 20th-century United States
Sylwester Ratowt, American Philosophical Society
Their Colleagues Rejected Them, but Publics Accepted Them: Public Intellectuals and the Limits of Scientific Professionalization, 1890-1920
Paul Burnett, St. Thomas University
You Can Run Numbers But You Can’t Hide: Agricultural Economists Define the Nature of Their Calling, 1942-52
Audra Wolfe, Independent Scholar
Between Popularization and Policy: Biological Scientists as Public Intellectuals, 1945-1972
Erik Peterson, University of Notre Dame
What Does Gregory Bateson’s Status as a Philosopher for the New Age Have to Do With the Delay on the Synthesis Between Evolutionary and Developmental Biology?
Commentator: Hunter Heyck, University of Oklahoma
C202, Panel 15
Technology, Philosophy, and Film: The Idea of American Cinema from D.W. Griffith to Terrence Malick
Daniel Wuebben, The City College of New York, The Graduate Center
Wire-Cutting and Cross-Cutting: The Telegraph and Tension in the Early Western
Andreas Killen, The City College of New York
Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold-War Subject
Martin Woessner, The City College of New York, Center for Worker Education
The Fourfold on Film: Terrence Malick between Stanley Cavell and Martin Heidegger
Commentator: Marlene Clark, The City College of New York, Center for Worker Education
C203, Panel 16
Varieties of Conservatism, Mid-Twentieth Century
Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University
The New Humanist Controversy and the Conservative-Modernist Split in American Intellectual Life
Seth Bartee, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
The Reactionary Historians: The Rejection of Disciplinary Professionalism and the Problems of Historical Scholarship in Democracy
Emily Dufton, The George Washington University
“Hurrah for Western Civilization!”: Representations of Africa in the Conservative Cultural Imagination
Commentator: Kim Phillips-Fein, New York University-Gallatin
C204, Panel 17
Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Thought
Donna J. Drucker, Indiana State University
“A Most Interesting Chapter in the History of Science”: Intellectual Responses to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
Joseph Malherek, The George Washington University
Market Segmentation as Discursive Deflection: Social Critics and Their Adversaries in Advertising
Edward J.K. Gitre, University of Virginia
Observing the “Ries-man”: The Social Scientific Imagination in Mid-twentieth-century America
Commentator: David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
C205, Panel 18
Fame, Myth-making, Authority, and Public Intellectuals
Ben Wurgaft, The New School
Leo Strauss and the Public Intellectuals
David K. Hecht, Bowdoin College
Rewriting Oppenheimer: Moral Authority and the Public Scientist
Erik M. Greenberg, Autry National Center/UCLA
The American Career of Israel Zangwill: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Fame and the Public Intellectual
Commentator: Robert Westbrook, University of Rochester
6:00-8:00 pm
Segal Theatre
Plenary: Renewing Black Intellectual History
Participants:
Adolph Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania
Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago
Dean E. Robinson, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Touré F. Reed, Illinois State University
Friday, October 22, 2010
10:00 am-12:00: Session D
Segal Theatre, Panel 19
Do-It-Yourself Criticism: Inquiries into Values, 1945-1975
Daniel H. Borus, University of Rochester
The Conspicuous Consumption of Thorstein Veblen, 1945-1960
Lisa Szefel, Pacific University
Peter Viereck’s Mid-Century “New Conservatism”: “Uncautiously Daring, Free-Thinking Lovers of Beauty”
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Philosophy out of Doors: Thinking as a Handicraft and Spiritual Practice in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Commentator: J. David Hoeveler, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
C201, Panel 20
The Intellectuals' Cold War: An Historiographical Challenge
Matthew J. Cotter, CUNY, The Graduate Center
The Philosopher as Heretic: Sidney Hook and Higher Education’s Cold War
Michael Brenes, CUNY, The Graduate Center
From Isolation to Wilsonianism: William F. Buckley and Conservative Internationalism during the Early Cold War
Peter Aigner, CUNY, The Graduate Center
Hannah Arendt’s Revolution
Commentator: Jennifer Delton, Skidmore College
C202, Panel 21
Religion and Early African-American Political Thought
Christopher Cameron, University of North Carolina Charlotte
Puritanism and the Ideological Origins of Black Politics in America
Peter Wirzbicki, New York University
The Adelphic Union, Transcendentalism, and the Creation of a Black Intellectual Life in Antebellum Boston
Molly Oshatz, San Francisco State University
The Antislavery Origins of Historicism in America
Commentator: James Levy, Hofstra University
C203, Panel 22
Americans and the World, 1898-1922
Trygve V. R. Throntveit, Harvard University
A League for the Layperson: Public Intellectuals, Presidential Leadership, and Popular Internationalism in the Era of the Treaty Fight, 1918-1922
Matthew J. Shaughnessy, Marist College
Memory, War and the Judeo-Christian Mission in Lowell Thomas’ Travelogues, 1917-1919
Commentator: Craig A. Daigle, The City College of New York
C204, Panel 23
Aesthetics and Ideas
Gary Grieve-Carlson, Lebanon Valley College
In the Borderlands: American Poetry Engages History
Christina G. Larocco, University of Maryland, College Park
The Art of Politics / The Politics of Art: Tennessee Williams and His Audience
Camelia Lenart, SUNY Albany
Martha Graham and Bethsabee de Rothschild: an Artistic Friendship in the Service of Modern Dance
Valerie Hellstein, Boston College
Paintings All Around You: Paul Goodman, Vanguard Art, and the Abstract Expressionists
Commentator: Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
C205, Panel 24
Civil Religion and U.S. Intellectual History, Roundtable
Participants:
Wendy Wall, Binghamton University
Philip S. Gorski, Yale University
Raymond Haberski, Marian University
Commentator: Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee
12:15-1:15
C201: Special Session: Brown Bag Lunch
Brian Lloyd, University of California, Riverside
When the Audience was in the Streets: Pop Musicians and Political Insurgency in the late-1960s (includes audio presentation)
1:30-3:00 pm
Segal Theatre
Keynote Address
James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition
3:15-5:15: Session E
Segal Theatre, Panel 25
Conservative Influences from the Other Europe: American Conservatism and Eastern Europe
Nancy Sinkoff, Rutgers University
Vilna on My Mind: The Polishness of Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s Turn to Neoconservatism
Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
A Cold Warrior Before the Cold War: Ayn Rand as Russian Intellectual in America
Michael Kimmage, Catholic University
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Emptiness of American Conservatism
Comments: Audience
C201, Panel 26
Social Thought in the Progressive Era
Louise W. Knight, Northwestern University
The Ethical Limits of Rhetoric: Jane Addams and the Arguments for Women’s Suffrage
Richard L. Hughes, Illinois State University
From Jewish Ghetto to “Negro Invasion”: The Contested History of the Black Ghetto during the Progressive Era
Shaun S. Nichols, Harvard University
Creating a New Republic: Progressivism, Pluralism, and the Search for the Public Good, 1908-1930
Neil Jumonville, Florida State University
The Curious Case of Privacy
Commentator: Jackson Lears, Rutgers University
C202, Panel 27
Rock Critics as Public Intellectuals: Mass-Cultural Music Writing From the 60s to the Present
Chair: Nick Bromell, University of Massachusetts
Devon Powers, Drexel University
The Problem of Pop: Rock Criticism, Pop Intellectualism, and Postmodernity
Michael J. Kramer, Northwestern University
Creem Magazine and Rock Criticism's Public Intellectuals After the Sixties Counterculture
Daphne Carr, Columbia University
Lad Mags in the Post-PC Era: Rock Criticism, Gender, and Sexuality, 1990-2010
Commentator: Paul Anderson, University of Michigan
C203, Panel 28
Intellectuals and Rural Life from World War I to the Cold War
Todd Dresser, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Encounters with Carol Kennecott: Rural Sociology and Rural Community Development, 1919-1929
Gabriel Rosenberg, Brown University
'Low Modern’-izing the Family Farm: The Pronatalist Turn in the late-New Deal USDA
Daniel Immerwahr, University of California, Berkeley
Agrarian Intellectuals at Home and Abroad: Decentralism in U.S. Thought and Policy, 1935–1955
Commentator: Andrew Jewett, Harvard University
C204, Panel 29
Racial Politics, Intellectuals, and Academia
Lauren Kientz Anderson, University of Kentucky
Abram Harris’s Identity as an Intellectual and an Academic
Jason Schulman, Emory University
Contingencies of History: Herbert Gutman and the Politics of Family Discourse
Stephen Kercher, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
Academic Intellectuals, Race, and the Impact of Black Student Demonstrations in Wisconsin During the Late 1960s
Carl Pedersen, Copenhagen Business School
The Obama Dilemma: Confronting Race in the 21st Century
Commentator: Jonathan Scott Holloway, Yale University
C205, Panel 30
American Jewish Intellectuals: The “Old Left” and Beyond
Julian Nemeth, Brandeis University
Sidney Hook, Herbert Aptheker, and the Politics of Academic Freedom
David Weinfeld, New York University
Horace Kallen Reconsidered: Cultural Pluralism and Hybridity as Lived Experience
Ronnie Grinberg, University of Colorado, Boulder
An Often Overlooked Conservative: Midge Decter—A 'Scourge of Feminist Dogma’
Commentator: Tony Michels, University of Wisconsin-Madison
7:00-9:00 pm
Elebash Recital Hall
Plenary: Intellectual History for What?
Participants:
George Cotkin, Cal Poly
Rochelle Gurstein, Independent Scholar
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University
Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee
David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
Selasa, 13 Juli 2010
CFP: Special Issue of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (EJPAP)
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2011, 2, 2.
Symposia: “Pragmatism and the social sciences: a century of influences and interactions”
Editors: Roberto Frega (University of Bologna), Filipe Carreira da Silva (University of Lisbon)
The second issue of 2011 of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (EJPAP) will be devoted to the relationship between pragmatism and the social sciences. The issue is explicitly interdisciplinary in focus and aims at assessing the relevance and fruitfulness of the pragmatist tradition for the development of contemporary social theory, as well as the place of pragmatist themes and concepts within the social sciences.
Since its origins, in fact, classical American pragmatism has been a philosophy resolutely open to the social sciences. Not only pragmatists have been actively engaged in social scientific research themselves (think of W. James, J. Dewey, G.H. Mead, C. Morris), but they have also conceived of the birth and development of the social sciences as one of the most innovative traits of modern society, the one truly capable of incarnating the pragmatist conception of the scope of knowledge within human experience.
It was mostly to social sciences, in fact, that pragmatist philosophers, social scientists, and reformers such as J. Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, L. Trilling, S. Hook, W. Mills turned to in order to find the analytical categories that could make philosophical thinking more attuned to the transformations changing contemporary societies. At the same time, the social sciences have always looked at pragmatism as a philosophy that offers useful tools for making sense of social, cultural and political practices and institutions.
The aim of this issue of EJPAP is to discuss the reciprocal influences between pragmatism and the social sciences, and at exploring the current state of their interactions within contemporary philosophy and social sciences.
Contributions from both philosophers and social scientists are thus welcome.
Possible questions for discussion include at least the following:
1. The role of pragmatist concepts for empirical social scientific research. How have concepts such as: public, situation, self, agency been developed by social scientists in their empirical work? What normative practices have been adopted because of influences stemming from pragmatism? What is the heuristic value of pragmatist categories and theories for work in the social sciences?
2. The role of the social sciences in the development of pragmatism. Historical accounts of the close relation (since the inception of the pragmatist movement) between pragmatist philosophy and experimental and social science are particularly welcome; these could include, for example, discussions of the importance of the social sciences in the development of the philosophies of Peirce, James, Dewey or Mead. Papers discussing the epistemological dimension of this historical relation are also welcome. Of equal interest are theoretical questions concerning the extent to which pragmatist philosophers draw upon empirical research to illustrate their claims, or of how research carried on within the social sciences has been and still is integrated in the reflection of pragmatist philosophers.
3. Pragmatism as a philosophy of the social sciences. Is there really a pragmatist philosophy of the social sciences? Which are its main, distinctive traits? How might traditional pragmatist sources contribute to its development? Which are the current approaches to the philosophy of the social sciences within the pragmatist tradition?
Abstracts of 400-500 words should be sent to Roberto Frega (roberto.frega@unibo.it) by February 15th 2011.
The deadline for receipt of submissions is November 15th 2011. This issue of EJPAP will appear online in late 2011.
Symposia: “Pragmatism and the social sciences: a century of influences and interactions”
Editors: Roberto Frega (University of Bologna), Filipe Carreira da Silva (University of Lisbon)
The second issue of 2011 of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (EJPAP) will be devoted to the relationship between pragmatism and the social sciences. The issue is explicitly interdisciplinary in focus and aims at assessing the relevance and fruitfulness of the pragmatist tradition for the development of contemporary social theory, as well as the place of pragmatist themes and concepts within the social sciences.
Since its origins, in fact, classical American pragmatism has been a philosophy resolutely open to the social sciences. Not only pragmatists have been actively engaged in social scientific research themselves (think of W. James, J. Dewey, G.H. Mead, C. Morris), but they have also conceived of the birth and development of the social sciences as one of the most innovative traits of modern society, the one truly capable of incarnating the pragmatist conception of the scope of knowledge within human experience.
It was mostly to social sciences, in fact, that pragmatist philosophers, social scientists, and reformers such as J. Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, L. Trilling, S. Hook, W. Mills turned to in order to find the analytical categories that could make philosophical thinking more attuned to the transformations changing contemporary societies. At the same time, the social sciences have always looked at pragmatism as a philosophy that offers useful tools for making sense of social, cultural and political practices and institutions.
The aim of this issue of EJPAP is to discuss the reciprocal influences between pragmatism and the social sciences, and at exploring the current state of their interactions within contemporary philosophy and social sciences.
Contributions from both philosophers and social scientists are thus welcome.
Possible questions for discussion include at least the following:
1. The role of pragmatist concepts for empirical social scientific research. How have concepts such as: public, situation, self, agency been developed by social scientists in their empirical work? What normative practices have been adopted because of influences stemming from pragmatism? What is the heuristic value of pragmatist categories and theories for work in the social sciences?
2. The role of the social sciences in the development of pragmatism. Historical accounts of the close relation (since the inception of the pragmatist movement) between pragmatist philosophy and experimental and social science are particularly welcome; these could include, for example, discussions of the importance of the social sciences in the development of the philosophies of Peirce, James, Dewey or Mead. Papers discussing the epistemological dimension of this historical relation are also welcome. Of equal interest are theoretical questions concerning the extent to which pragmatist philosophers draw upon empirical research to illustrate their claims, or of how research carried on within the social sciences has been and still is integrated in the reflection of pragmatist philosophers.
3. Pragmatism as a philosophy of the social sciences. Is there really a pragmatist philosophy of the social sciences? Which are its main, distinctive traits? How might traditional pragmatist sources contribute to its development? Which are the current approaches to the philosophy of the social sciences within the pragmatist tradition?
Abstracts of 400-500 words should be sent to Roberto Frega (roberto.frega@unibo.it) by February 15th 2011.
The deadline for receipt of submissions is November 15th 2011. This issue of EJPAP will appear online in late 2011.
CFP: Special Issue of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (EJPAP)
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2011, 2, 2.
Symposia: “Pragmatism and the social sciences: a century of influences and interactions”
Editors: Roberto Frega (University of Bologna), Filipe Carreira da Silva (University of Lisbon)
The second issue of 2011 of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (EJPAP) will be devoted to the relationship between pragmatism and the social sciences. The issue is explicitly interdisciplinary in focus and aims at assessing the relevance and fruitfulness of the pragmatist tradition for the development of contemporary social theory, as well as the place of pragmatist themes and concepts within the social sciences.
Since its origins, in fact, classical American pragmatism has been a philosophy resolutely open to the social sciences. Not only pragmatists have been actively engaged in social scientific research themselves (think of W. James, J. Dewey, G.H. Mead, C. Morris), but they have also conceived of the birth and development of the social sciences as one of the most innovative traits of modern society, the one truly capable of incarnating the pragmatist conception of the scope of knowledge within human experience.
It was mostly to social sciences, in fact, that pragmatist philosophers, social scientists, and reformers such as J. Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, L. Trilling, S. Hook, W. Mills turned to in order to find the analytical categories that could make philosophical thinking more attuned to the transformations changing contemporary societies. At the same time, the social sciences have always looked at pragmatism as a philosophy that offers useful tools for making sense of social, cultural and political practices and institutions.
The aim of this issue of EJPAP is to discuss the reciprocal influences between pragmatism and the social sciences, and at exploring the current state of their interactions within contemporary philosophy and social sciences.
Contributions from both philosophers and social scientists are thus welcome.
Possible questions for discussion include at least the following:
1. The role of pragmatist concepts for empirical social scientific research. How have concepts such as: public, situation, self, agency been developed by social scientists in their empirical work? What normative practices have been adopted because of influences stemming from pragmatism? What is the heuristic value of pragmatist categories and theories for work in the social sciences?
2. The role of the social sciences in the development of pragmatism. Historical accounts of the close relation (since the inception of the pragmatist movement) between pragmatist philosophy and experimental and social science are particularly welcome; these could include, for example, discussions of the importance of the social sciences in the development of the philosophies of Peirce, James, Dewey or Mead. Papers discussing the epistemological dimension of this historical relation are also welcome. Of equal interest are theoretical questions concerning the extent to which pragmatist philosophers draw upon empirical research to illustrate their claims, or of how research carried on within the social sciences has been and still is integrated in the reflection of pragmatist philosophers.
3. Pragmatism as a philosophy of the social sciences. Is there really a pragmatist philosophy of the social sciences? Which are its main, distinctive traits? How might traditional pragmatist sources contribute to its development? Which are the current approaches to the philosophy of the social sciences within the pragmatist tradition?
Abstracts of 400-500 words should be sent to Roberto Frega (roberto.frega@unibo.it) by February 15th 2011.
The deadline for receipt of submissions is November 15th 2011. This issue of EJPAP will appear online in late 2011.
Symposia: “Pragmatism and the social sciences: a century of influences and interactions”
Editors: Roberto Frega (University of Bologna), Filipe Carreira da Silva (University of Lisbon)
The second issue of 2011 of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (EJPAP) will be devoted to the relationship between pragmatism and the social sciences. The issue is explicitly interdisciplinary in focus and aims at assessing the relevance and fruitfulness of the pragmatist tradition for the development of contemporary social theory, as well as the place of pragmatist themes and concepts within the social sciences.
Since its origins, in fact, classical American pragmatism has been a philosophy resolutely open to the social sciences. Not only pragmatists have been actively engaged in social scientific research themselves (think of W. James, J. Dewey, G.H. Mead, C. Morris), but they have also conceived of the birth and development of the social sciences as one of the most innovative traits of modern society, the one truly capable of incarnating the pragmatist conception of the scope of knowledge within human experience.
It was mostly to social sciences, in fact, that pragmatist philosophers, social scientists, and reformers such as J. Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, L. Trilling, S. Hook, W. Mills turned to in order to find the analytical categories that could make philosophical thinking more attuned to the transformations changing contemporary societies. At the same time, the social sciences have always looked at pragmatism as a philosophy that offers useful tools for making sense of social, cultural and political practices and institutions.
The aim of this issue of EJPAP is to discuss the reciprocal influences between pragmatism and the social sciences, and at exploring the current state of their interactions within contemporary philosophy and social sciences.
Contributions from both philosophers and social scientists are thus welcome.
Possible questions for discussion include at least the following:
1. The role of pragmatist concepts for empirical social scientific research. How have concepts such as: public, situation, self, agency been developed by social scientists in their empirical work? What normative practices have been adopted because of influences stemming from pragmatism? What is the heuristic value of pragmatist categories and theories for work in the social sciences?
2. The role of the social sciences in the development of pragmatism. Historical accounts of the close relation (since the inception of the pragmatist movement) between pragmatist philosophy and experimental and social science are particularly welcome; these could include, for example, discussions of the importance of the social sciences in the development of the philosophies of Peirce, James, Dewey or Mead. Papers discussing the epistemological dimension of this historical relation are also welcome. Of equal interest are theoretical questions concerning the extent to which pragmatist philosophers draw upon empirical research to illustrate their claims, or of how research carried on within the social sciences has been and still is integrated in the reflection of pragmatist philosophers.
3. Pragmatism as a philosophy of the social sciences. Is there really a pragmatist philosophy of the social sciences? Which are its main, distinctive traits? How might traditional pragmatist sources contribute to its development? Which are the current approaches to the philosophy of the social sciences within the pragmatist tradition?
Abstracts of 400-500 words should be sent to Roberto Frega (roberto.frega@unibo.it) by February 15th 2011.
The deadline for receipt of submissions is November 15th 2011. This issue of EJPAP will appear online in late 2011.
Kamis, 08 Juli 2010
Hartman On Blake
Review of Casey Nelson Blake, ed., The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4029-0. 361 pages.Review by Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University
July 2010
“At stake in every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living, that is, the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into arbitrariness.” Pierre Bourdieu
In what Patrick Buchanan described as a “dramatic understatement,” Ronald Reagan’s 1989 farewell address included a simple critique of artists and other cultural producers. “For those who create the popular culture,” Reagan lamented, “patriotism is no longer in style.” Buchanan was more explicit: “America’s art and culture are, more and more, openly anti-Christian, anti-American, nihilistic.” The culture had not lived up to the conservative promise of what Sidney Blumenthal termed “Reaganism and the neokitsch aesthetic,” a nostalgic rendering of 1950s America, when John Wayne and Ward Cleaver were models for all things decent.
Instead, the 1980s gave us Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which portrayed, in Reverend Donald Wildmon’s contemptuous words, a “weak, insecure, mentally deranged Jesus.” It also gave us Andres Serrano’s seemingly blasphemous Piss Christ—literally a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine—and Robert Mapplethorpe’s highly stylized, homoerotic black-and-white photography. “While the right has been busy winning primaries and elections,” Buchanan wrote in 1989, “the left has been quietly seizing the commanding heights of American art and culture.”The anxious commentary by conservatives like Reagan, Buchanan, and Wildmon was less proof of leftist cultural hegemony than of the culture wars, or the “fragmentation of public experience,” which, in the words of Casey Nelson Blake, “represents Americans’ multiple visions of a good life in ways that rule out the very possibility of a common conversation between citizens” (5). Blake, a professor of history at Columbia University, is the editor of The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State, a compelling and useful anthology of essays that addresses “the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the relationship between the arts and public life in modern America” (2).
Along with the rest of the Penn Press series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life In Modern America,” which Blake also edits, The Arts of Democracy seeks to place expressive culture in dialog with ideas. (See Tim Lacy’s review of another book in this series, Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century. Also see Lacy’s interview of Smith.) Blake and the other contributors to this anthology largely succeed in their mission to connect art to a broader intellectual context, especially insofar as they relate art to political culture.In Blake’s introduction, three types of response to the September 11, 2001 attacks nicely illustrate how art interacts with public culture and the state. First, the avalanche of artistic expression in New York City following the hateful demolition of the World Trade Center reminds us that humans long for symbolic representation, especially in their darkest hour. Second, efforts on the part of authorities to channel this artistic outpouring exemplify how cultural politics are transposed onto politics writ large, or, how the state seeks to control the cultivation of its citizen-subjects. And third, the eventual battle over the meaning of September 11 demonstrates that in postmodern America, there can be no common conversation, even about a collective trauma. “By the time of the fourth anniversary of the attacks,” Blake writes, “the familiar dynamic of the cultural wars had extinguished any hope for the rebuilt World Trade Center as an open, public space. Conservative relatives of the victims and their political and media allies mobilized to banish a proposed ‘Freedom Center’ for the site on the grounds that it might dishonor the dead” (2).
Although battles over September 11 representations work well as an introduction to a book on art and politics, the culture wars of the previous two decades seem to weigh more heavily on The Arts of Democracy. Michael Kammen’s chapter, “Culture and the State in America,” a revised edition of his well-known 1996 Journal of American History article, is a case in point. He introduces his chapter by referencing the highly publicized 1980s and 1990s shouting matches over art, including the fierce legislative attack on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) budget, which stemmed from conservative disgust over NEA money that subsidized Serrano and Mapplethorpe. Kammen’s chapter seeks to place the intellectual and political history of the NEA, created in 1965 as part of Lyndon’s Johnson’s Great Society, in a context that predates the culture wars—in a time before 1995, when Newt Gingrich suggested in Time magazine that “removing cultural funding from the federal budget ultimately will improve the arts and the country.” Kammen, then, is cognizant of an important historical shift in how the NEA was perceived by various people. He writes: “We tend to forget that in 1964-65, when the NEA was being hesitantly created, some of the most prestigious artists, art critics, and arts institutions felt suspicious of politicians and believed that they had more to lose than to gain from any involvement in the political process. Three decades later, that pattern of mistrust has been turned inside out. Now it is numerous politicians who regard artists and arts organizations as tainted and unreliable” (71).
Similarly, in an essay titled, “A Modernist Vision: The Origins and Early Years of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Visual Arts Program,” Donna Binkiewicz historicizes the aesthetic preferences of the NEA, always political, to demonstrate that typical understandings of the NEA, rooted in the culture wars narratives, lack historical depth. In other words, the NEA did not always support the avant-garde, or what Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), the endowment’s fiercest political critic, described as “gross, vulgar, and offensive” art. Rather, Binkiewicz details the ways in which the early NEA was a product of Cold War liberalism, as opposed to “the radical avant-garde façade that conservatives like Jesse Helms plastered upon it during the 1990s” (171). The early NEA funded modernist styles that, far from avant-garde, had long been acceptable to mainstream consumers of art. It also endowed art thought devoid of political meaning, which ran against the grain of the more innovative visual art of that era. “While American visual art in the 1960s embraced pop, minimalism, performance, feminist, black, and Chicano arts that were more critical of American society,” Binkiewicz writes, “federal art support continued to favor older modernist forms. NEA grants tilted especially toward abstract expressionist and color field artists, who had risen to dominate the art world in the 1950s and whose works were seen as the best representation of American freedom during the Cold War” (172).
The Johnson administration blocked artists it considered too political from joining the National Council on the Arts, including critic Susan Sontag, outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and painter Ben Shahn, creator of social realist pieces such as The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931-32. In short, the history of the NEA demonstrates that earlier struggles over art and federal largesse were between Cold War liberals and cultural leftists, a division that seemingly died out when culture war divisions between secular liberals and traditionalist conservatives became paramount.Rather than analyzing the more distant history of political struggle over art, Paul DiMaggio and Bethany Bryson, in their contribution titled, “Public Attitudes toward Cultural Authority and Cultural Diversity in Higher Education and the Arts,” mine more recent poll data to unmask the conventional culture wars wisdom as false. Specifically, DiMaggio and Bryson rely upon a 1993 opinion survey about attitudes towards the arts and education. Whereas conservatives like Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball argued that college made students more relativistic, and thus less likely to support traditional or high cultural forms such as the canon and fine art, the survey indicated that college graduates had more respect for high culture than non-college graduates. However, the survey also suggested that college graduates were likelier to support multiculturalism, which, in the minds of DiMaggio and Bryson, is evidence that the bifurcation between traditional and multicultural education is a false one. Although this is an important conclusion to draw, the authors then extrapolate from it to make the dubious claim that “if there was a culture war in progress, clearly most of the population had not enlisted on either side” (255). This form of analysis is common among sociologists and political scientists such as Alan Wolfe and Morris Fiorina, who too frequently put a narrow type of empiricism to work to dismiss the culture wars as the over-hyped preoccupation of the political class and the media. Such a characterization amounts to truism: elite actors generally defined or redefined the boundaries of most national political discourse. To DiMaggio and Bryson’s credit, they do not entirely write off cultural conflict as mere hype. Rather, they claim that the poll data “suggests that explanations for conflict over education and the arts must be sought not in the structure of public opinion but in the specific institutional features of these fields and in the strategies and tactics of mobilized social movements” (263). This is a wise suggestion as far as it goes. But institutional history alone will not clarify the large degree to which intellectual discourse was shaped by the culture wars, and why so many Americans consumed culture war controversies.
An alternative way to conceptualize cultural controversy is through an analysis of the fragmentations and hybrid forms that accompanied the shift from modernism to postmodernism, another of the central threads that tie the chapters of The Arts of Democracy together. In one of my favorite essays of the anthology, Michele Bogart’s “Norman Rockwell, Public Artist” demonstrates that the boundaries between modernism and postmodernism were blurred even at the height of the former. Such porosity, though, goes unnoticed, largely because art historians tend to focus their scholarly lenses on modernist art that they consider “good”—“abstract, politically progressive, and vigorously noncommercial” (33). By rethinking Norman Rockwell’s oeuvre, long criticized as “inauthentic, commercial kitsch,” Bogart seeks to reclaim Rockwell as an artist who anticipated the postmodern crossover between public and private.
Bogart’s Rockwell, in other words, was more correct than his critics in his assertion “that commercial and fine art were integrally connected in twentieth-century America” (47). According to Bogart, Rockwell consciously used paintings such as The Connoisseur (1962), a depiction of a man facing an abstract expressionist painting, to point out that “boundaries asserted firmly by cosmopolitan critics were… arbitrary, narrow-minded, and elitist” (49), anticipating the more conscious postmodern turn of artists like Andy Warhol.Penny Von Eschen’s piece, “The Goodwill Ambassador: Duke Ellington and Black Worldliness,” also documents how one artist defied modern boundaries. Von Eschen contends that Duke Ellington’s views of the world, and of his music in particular, were largely shaped by his relentless touring around the globe at the behest of the State Department—tours that “represented the international arm of what Casey Blake has described as a distinctly modern moment in American art that was self-consciously tied to definitions of Cold War freedom” (152). That said, although Ellington believed in the purposes of the American Cold War, he resisted official State Department narratives about “jazz,” rejecting the word itself as too American-centric. When lecturing to overseas audiences, Ellington described his music as international, hybrid, even pan-African, a framework Von Eschen labels a “black counterculture of modernity,” borrowing a phrase from Paul Gilroy. In this vein, Von Eschen concludes that, although the culture-as-diplomacy tactic smacked of imperialism, “to export American culture was to inevitably export its hybridity, its complexities, its tensions and contradictions” (167). In other words, the State Department got more than it bargained for.
Casey Nelson Blake’s own contribution, “Between Civics and Politics: The Modernist Moment in Federal Public Art,” explores the era sandwiched between Alexander Calder’s sculpture La Grande Vitesse, installed in Grand Rapids in 1969, and the 1989 dismantling of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc in Manhattan—two decades that “mark the modernist moment in federally funded public art” (200). La Grande Vitesse was the first work funded by the Art in Public Places program of the NEA and, although it was not without its critics, most Grand Rapids residents celebrated it as a monument to civic pride. On the other hand, Tilted Arc, also built with public funds, was removed from Federal Plaza after eight years of protests and lawsuits. 
Various reasons were given as to why people wanted Serra’s sculpture removed, but none as satisfying as Blake’s historical explanation. “The unraveling of that modernist project for public art, so soon after its inception,” Blake writes, “reminds us that the transition from artistic modernism to postmodernism was not simply a shift in taste or aesthetic style. Rather, the crisis of modernist art in public spaces was intimately related to the crisis of the Kennedy-era liberalism that inspired it. Controversies over public art reveal that the movement from modernism to postmodernism was a thoroughly political process, shaped by deep conflicts over power and the structure of public life” (201). How did this work? Blake relates the dissatisfaction with public art installations to the dissatisfaction with urban liberalism, which crumbled under the weight of fiscal crisis and the failed promise of renewal. “Public art,” he argues, “invited attack as the most visible manifestation of the liberal state in urban spaces” (208).Blake concludes that liberal modernism should be reevaluated as a flawed attempt to democratize art in public space. In framing art in negative terms—in opposition to Soviet totalitarianism—rather than as something the government should positively seek to construct, liberal modernism accentuated a privatized vision of art. “This was a recipe for public art without public purposes,” Blake contends, “an art created for a nation of private individuals” (203). In other words, liberal modernism sowed the seeds of its own demise. This then created a vacuum that conservatives proved successful at filling, illustrated by the popularity of the patriotic imagery of neo-traditionalism, such as Nizette Brennan’s Knoxville Flag. Neo-traditional art, an updated version of the Reagan era “neokitsch aesthetic,” articulates collective meaning in a time mostly devoid of it. The challenge, then, is to create an alternative to this conservative vision of the world, to build a public, democratic art that speaks in purposeful ways to our collective desires for peace and justice. At least, that’s the message I take from this excellent anthology.
[Editor's note: Click here for the permanent link to this review.]
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