In Quest of Intellectual Community

In this fascinating essay, Eric Miller, author of the excellent intellectual biography, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, reflects on his experience at the 2011 U.S. Intellectual History Conference. Miller's perspective is, I think, pretty different from many attendees, which makes this essay that much more interesting. A small sample:

It was most basically a tradition at play, serious play. Even liberal modernity requires earthy sites of institutionalized ritual (think panel+respondent+Q&A, or wine and cheese receptions, or "business meetings"), although the underground suite of grey classrooms we huddled within at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York could hardly be described as "earthy"—dull windowless rooms lit in florescent white and cluttered with wires, screens, and plastic chairs.

The upshot, though, like most of the rest of us, Miller enjoyed himself, thinking that, just perhaps, he found an intellectual community that suits him. For those of you who wish to see if our intellectual community is the right one for you, submit a proposal for this year's conference.

Women and Intellectual History

At the Fourth Annual Conference of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, the first plenary on the evening of November 17, 2011 was on U.S. Women's Intellectual Traditions; a panel instigated by conference chair Mike O'Connor and organized by Louise (Lucy) Knight of Northwestern University.

The session was well-attended and the discussion interesting and lively. The panelists impressed me with both their intellectual dexterity (having to speak on a wide range of topics) and the strength of their prose. Following the session, I asked Lucy Knight for a copy of the talks with the intention of posting them on our blog. In light of the recent debate over women, politics, and power, the comments of the panel ring with immediacy.

The panel included: Lucy Knight (moderator and presenter), Megan Marshall, Philippa Strum, Sherie Randolph, and Maria Cotera. Lucy Knight began with introductory remarks, framing the session, and then followed Megan Marshall with a presentation on her specific research projects. Knight, Marshall, Cotera had written remarks that they could submit for this post; Strum and Randolph had spoken from notes. Enjoy!

Opening Remarks

Louise W. Knight

Thank you, Andrew [Hartman], for the introduction and thanks especially to you and your conference committee for proposing this topic for a plenary. We are delighted to take it on, even though it is much bigger than we can do just justice to.

As it turns out, and as some of you know, women and intellectual history has been a hot topic on the USIH blog recently. Lauren Kientz Anderson started the conversation by asking how we should interpret the fact, as she observed it, that relatively few women had posted or commented on the blog. She also raised questions about the place of women scholars in the field. As so often happens in blogs, topics began to ramify. Some asked, and even answered, that perennially thorny question – do women in the field, or even in general, argue or think or analyze differently than men do? Others wondered if the question itself was a red herring left over from antediluvian times, to mix my metaphors.

Reading all this, Bill Fine then posted a guest blog to share some facts. He analyzed the content from 1979 to the present of the Intellectual History Newsletter, subsequently transformed into the journal Modern Intellectual History. He reported on the number of articles by women scholars and listed the articles and the authors that addressed how the field has dealt with women’s intellectual history, mostly in the context of cultural studies. His Nov. 15^th post is a great resource for those wishing to know about the work of women scholars and the history of the field’s interest in this topic.

The concerns probed by the blog about women and the field remind us that the issues and ideas dealt with in women’s intellectual history are far from passé. They inform our lives as professionals and shape the directions that our field takes. As for the role that this brand new society will play in all of this, there are some great signs that it will break new ground. The lively debate in the blog is one sign. Another is the fact that the society’s leadership proposed this plenary. Whatever the past has been, the present is our chance to do things differently.

Tonight’s topic is women’s intellectual traditions. We’ll be considering, impressionistically, the 200-year history of American women as sources of influential ideas. Thus we will look at: the history of women’s ideas about women and the history of women shaping the intellectual debates of their times. And, while the roundtable participants happen to be women, we might easily have had men as well. The focus here is historical intellectual content, not what gender is doing the scholarship.

Let me begin with the first topic. To state the obvious, women’s ideas about women are diverse and contested across all of American history and the origin of many of these ideas has been women’s rebellion against the status quo. When the nation was founded, women were denied most of their rights, from voting and jury duty, to preaching, popular lecturing, and holding political office, and most roles other than housewife, shopkeeper, servant, farmer, slave, teacher, or charity volunteer.

This situation was supported by a thicket of arguments about women’s limited capacities. Every time a woman embraced a new role, she had to marshal the arguments to justify her unorthodox behavior. Thus Anne Hutchinson and Sojourner Truth had to justify preaching God’s word, Maria Stewart had to justify becoming the first woman to give a public lecture to a mixed audience, Lucy Stone had to justify keeping her surname after marriage; and Jeanette Rankin had to justify serving as the first woman elected to a seat in the U.S. Congress.

We are not yet done with this process. In the near future, when a woman finally receives a major party’s nomination for the presidency, she and her supporters will have to justify that, although it will not be so obvious at first. In our modern enlightened era, she will face the seemingly respectable question, “Is the country ready for a woman president?” when in fact the real question will be whether she, as a woman, is capable of being president. This will become clear when the innuendos about women begin to fly thick and fast.

The traditions that held women back, of course, had their deeper justifications in the canon of (white, male) Western intellectual thought, in which women’s nature was sweepingly and confidently characterized. Women rebutted these arguments too.

When Kant asserted in 1764, “The fair sex has . . . a beautiful understanding [based on sense], whereas ours [men’s] should be a deep [sublime] understanding [based on reason],” Sarah Grimké rebutted. She wrote in 1837, “[Women’s] creator . . . prepared her . . . [to make progress] towards . . . [a] state of high mental cultivation.”[i]

When Hegel argued in 1821 that “[w]omen can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy or certain of the arts, [lacking] . .. a universal faculty,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton rebutted. She wrote in 1892: “Women are already the equals of men in the whole realm of thought, in art, science, literature, and government.”[ii]

And when Sigmund Freud argued in 1933, “[W]omen must be regarded as having little sense of justice,” Gloria Steinem rebutted. She proposed in 1994 that we imagine that Sigmund had been replaced in history by a woman named Phyllis Freud and that Phyllis had written, “Men must be regarded as having little sense of justice.”[iii] Actually, Steinem did not so much rebut as mock Sigmund’s claim, revealing it to be ridiculous by practicing gender reversal. Sometimes wit persuades better than reason.

Finally, women’s ideas about women (as well as about society) have diverged according to distinctions of race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other differences. In each of these areas, men’s experiences were, and are, not the same as women’s experiences and women’s experiences differ among themselves. Some women carry the burden of double or triple oppressions. This has led them to incisively deconstruct institutionalized prejudices no one else has noticed. They have particularly unpacked the prejudices that white upper middle class heterosexual women have held, and hold, against those women they considered Other. This is important work, since it shows the error of embracing “universalism.” We have called this panel, “women’s intellectual traditions,” in the plural, to stress that no one group of women can speak for all women. We honor Audre Lorde’s insight that the category of woman is itself full of subdivisions. Tonight we will learn more about the intellectual legacies of women of color from two of the panelists, and perhaps about a few of these other differences as well. Hopefully you in the audience will take up some of these other topics, to help fill in what we do not cover in the panel.

So far I have focused on women rebels’ ideas about women. But conservative women also have an intellectual tradition. Their arguments have generally centered on family and the individual virtues of self-sufficiency and respect for gendered social roles. Often they have built a bridge between an emerging status quo and traditional values. One thinks of antebellum northerners Catherine Beecher and Mary Lyon, two groundbreaking educators of women whose actions were bolder than some of their arguments. Or of the antebellum southerner Louisa Susannah McCord, who, in the words of one intellectual historian, “managed to fend off radical feminism, while still carving out a claim for the intellectual independence of women.”[iv] Or of the turn of the century writer and activist Anna Julia Cooper, who, in the words of one scholar, embodied “the classically southern virtues of home, religion and proper public conduct,” and also became of one the “most widely recognized symbols of the new black woman.”[v] The ideas of conservative women are certainly relevant to our conversation. [During the discussion, panelist Maria Cotera noted that a particular woman may hold views that are a mix of liberal and conservative, making it difficult to characterize her as one or the other.]

Women’s ideas about women also deal with many female-related controversies. These do not define women’s intellectual traditions, but they have certainly generated much thought. Some of the issues – which are all actually more than a century old -- include

· whether biology is destiny,

· whether there is such a thing as feminine thinking and what it might be. And if there is, which many doubt, is it the way all women think? Or is it the way women have historically been encouraged to think? Or is “feminine thinking” a way to refer to a kind of thinking that men and women can both do?

· what constitutes reproductive justice,

· What the place of sexuality is in advancing women’s status,

and, at least among conservatives,

· whether pursuing self-development is selfish, and

· how to define women’s duty.

Women and men have thoroughly debated how these issues apply to women. One waits hopefully for men and women to take up these questions with equal thoroughness as they apply to men.

OK. So women’s ideas about women are what first come to our minds when we think of women’s intellectual traditions, but we cannot stop there. These traditions have also included how women have shaped the general intellectual debates of their times. They have taken part in the long discussions in this country about transcendentalism, liberalism, individualism, socialism, conservatism, democracy, lesbianism, classicism, anarchism, imperialism, internationalism, the role of the state, racism, civil rights, and about constitutional interpretative questions, to name just a few. The panelists here will be providing us with plenty examples along these lines, and I am sure those of you in the audience can supply some more. One thinks of how Mercy Otis Warren wrote eloquently about federalism; Emma Goldman on anarchism, Maria Stewart on racism, Audre Lorde on homosexuality, Eleanor Roosevelt on human rights, and Rachel Carson on environmental ethics. If I have one wish for tonight, is that we all leave here with a fuller sense of the ways that women in history have engaged with and influenced the dominant discourse.

This panel will have a biographical focus. James Kloppenberg noted at the Organization for American Historians meeting last March that in the field of intellectual history, the study of individuals and biography has been and will continue to be very important. In keeping with that observation, each of the panelists here has in-depth knowledge of one or more women intellectuals whose contributions will form the basis of our comments.

To further focus our conversation, we have chosen six questions to address to get started, though we may not each address all of them. They include questions about

· a particular figure’s intellectual courage,

· her contributions to feminist thought,

· a large idea that she made persuasive and

· her influential arguments about, central concepts, and

· her ability to communicate her ideas.

We also will take up the conference theme and consider how our particular figure used narratives in her work or what narratives about that figure we are revising in our own work.

---

[i] Immanuel Kant, “The Interrelations of the Two Sexes,” from Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, reprinted in Rosemary Agonito, comp., History of Ideas on Woman: A Source Book (New York: Perigee Books/G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 130-31; Sarah Grimké, Letters on Equality of Sexes, Letter X, “Intellect of Woman,” in Elizabeth Ann Bartlett, ed. Sarah Grimké: Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 65.

[ii] Georg Hegel, “Marriage and the Family,” in The Philosophy of Right, reprinted in Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman, 167; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self,” in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, comp. Man Cannot Speak for Her, Vol. II, Key Texts of the Early Feminists (New York: Praeger, 1989), 382.

[iii] Sigmund Freud, “Woman as Castrated Man,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, reprinted in Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman, 321; Gloria Steinem, Moving Beyond Words (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 35-36.

[iv] Michael O’Brien, ed., All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1982), 329.

[v] Charles Lemert, “Anna Julia Cooper: The Colored Woman’s Office,” in The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, eds. (NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 4.

***

Megan Marshall

The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism

It’s a great honor to have been invited to participate in the S-USIH’s annual conference, particularly as my training is in American Literature rather than history, and I publish as a biographer. But this year’s conference theme–narrative–is one that comfortably includes a scholar like me, and is also especially appropriate for the two female public intellectuals I’m going to briefly introduce. Narrative was a device both of them relied on for conveying their ideas and for making certain that those ideas were remembered.

Lucy asked us to mention an example of our subjects’ “intellectual courage.” I can think of many examples for both Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. But one that they shared, really a trait more than an instance of bravery, bears mentioning here, because such courage may not be so necessary today. That was simply daring to talk their way into an intellectual scene–the Transcendentalist circle of the 1830s and ‘40s in New England–that was dominated by men, men with credentials these women could never attain.

To digress a minute, I mentioned that I hadn’t trained as an historian–a significant reason for that was the feeling of intimidation I experienced as an undergraduate when I stopped in at history classes in the 1970s at Harvard, then still a predominantly male institution, and with a history department populated almost exclusively by male faculty and students. I couldn’t make myself walk through the door into those classes.

Fortunately, I took one class, relegated to “Social Studies,” in women’s history, taught by the late Barbara Miller Solomon–herself a pioneering female intellectual–in which I learned about both Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, women who would readily have crossed the thresholds that I would not. I made myself a student of these lives over the following decades, and I learned how narratives had helped these women step forward.

Margaret Fuller, born in 1810, was simply an unstoppable force–until her tragic drowning in a shipwreck in 1850 at age 40. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously tweaked Fuller for possessing a “rather mountainous ME”–an enormous ego. Maybe that’s how her contemporaries had to see this unusually assertive woman, whose conversational skills both men and women recognized as superior. Fuller did think pretty highly of herself too, though. Here’s her own description: “a woman of tact & brilliancy like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we get our knowledge, &, while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel, & fly, & dart hither & thither, & seize with ready eye all the weak

points, like Saladin in the desert.”

Fuller led with her “I”–as a writer. Her first book, a travelogue based on a journey to America’s western frontier, Summer on the Lakes, drew on her first-hand accounts to protest the plight of the Indian and the wasting of natural resources; later her reform-minded journalism for the New York Tribune relied on her personal investigations of prisons, mental hospitals, and orphanages. She did the same with her coverage of the desperate conditions of mineworkers in England, and through the heady days of the first wave of Italy’s Risorgimento.

Fuller once noted that Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman she’d read early on, “was a woman whose existence better proved the need of some new interpretation of Woman’s Rights than anything she wrote.” Fuller’s life was to become so dramatic that the same could be said of her–but that’s another story. Fuller wrote this sentence in her great feminist treatise, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845. The book’s most famous line–“let them be sea captains!”–speaks for only a small part of Fuller’s insightful analysis there. One instance of Fuller’s “intellectual courage” in that book, for which she got much grief from reviewers and readers, even from women she’d once counted as friends, was a passage in which she theorizes about the problems of marriage, although she was not herself a

married woman. But Fuller’s disinterested perspective on marriage, her “I,” was what allowed her to point out that “in the majority of instances, the man looks upon his wife as an adopted child.” It took “intellectual courage,” in the same book, simply to write: “Woman can express publicly the fullness of thought and creation, without losing any of the peculiar beauty of her sex.”

Fuller wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century, but she died halfway through that 100-year span. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, born in 1804, lived almost ninety years, until 1894. The narrative that inspired her as a child, was one she’d “self-created,” as she later said. As a girl she listened to her mother’s stories of the family’s pilgrim ancestors. The little girl mis-heard her mother to say “Ann sisters”–she thought she was descended from a hardy race of women. And Elizabeth Peabody was frequently frustrated by the women she encountered in real life who didn’t share her own enterprising spirit. As a teenager attending women’s Bible study groups led by Rev. William Ellery Channing, she was appalled that no one spoke up. Later she would support herself by teaching college-level history classes for women, encouraging them to form opinions and speak their minds, the precursor of the famous “Conversations” that Margaret Fuller led in the 1840s.

Education was a lifelong interest, and Peabody ran what we might call progressive schools today, organized on principles of Socratic dialogue rather than rote learning. Later she was America’s foremost exponent of the kindergarten movement. But as a writer, Peabody didn’t have a “mountainous ME” like Fuller, rather the opposite. Her memoir has to be extracted from a book she published late in life called The Reminiscences of Rev. William Ellery Channing, which happens also to include accounts of Peabody’s own work as a teacher, as proprietor of a Boston foreign language bookshop where the Transcendentalists met, as publisher of their journal The Dial, as promoter of the group’s utopian community Brook Farm.

So–two different 19th-century New England women, two approaches to personal

narrative. Maybe we’ll consider in our discussion tonight whether it is a particularly useful practice for women, in a patriarchal intellectual climate, to turn to narrative, first-person testimony, as a means of establishing authority when no credentials can be had, and of conveying ideas from a vantage point of relative powerlessness.

***

Louise Knight

Jane Addams

Because the theme about this conference is narrative, I would like to start with the topic of the narratives I am revising about my subject, Jane Addams, a leader of the settlement house movement and the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

The narrative most people know is that she was a philanthropist who cared about the poor; the image they have is of a sentimental, naïve do gooder. It is obvious why this narrative has dominated both academic and popular impressions of her: it fit the gendered stereotypes about an admired woman. Those stereotypes have less dominance now, but the portrait established in print lingers forever. This is especially true in Jane Addams’s case. My new biography of Addams, published in 2010, is the first full life written in thirty-seven years.

The narrative most people don’t know is that she was a labor activist, a major political figure, a feminist, a radical visionary and a public intellectual

In these remarks, I will focus on the last three of these.

FEMINIST

Addams called herself a feminist and by that she meant she supported women’s rights. In fact, nearly her entire reform agenda was shaped by that commitment. She was seeking to empower women not only when she worked on women’s suffrage and women’s trade union organizing but also when she worked on general labor and immigrant legislation and free speech. In 1915, she became the founding president of the Woman’s Peace Party and of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and both of these groups’ platforms were about women’s rights as much as they were about peace. And she had incisive observations to make about the patriarchy.

RADICAL VISIONARY

Addams did not come across to most people as a radical visionary and for good reasons. In politics, she believed in seeking “the best possible” and while her vision for society’s future was radical, she was very skilled at presenting these ideas gently, sort of easing them into people’s minds. However, when you read her work, you s come across fierce sentences that show the radical thinking that behind her positions.

For example, in her famous speech about the Pullman Strike, “A Modern Lear,” she wrote, “Nothing will satisfy the aroused conscience of men short of the complete participation of the working classes in the spiritual, intellectual and material inheritance of the human race.”

And in a commencement speech she gave at a woman’s college in 1895, she rebutted the traditional view of women’s superior moral purity: “Women have not made politics impure, have not corrupted legislatures and wrecked railroads, only because they have not had the opportunity to do so. They have been chained down by a military code whose penalty [for violation] is far worse than the court martial.”

A MAJOR PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

To illustrate Addams’ standing as a public intellectual, let me discuss Addams’s thinking about two ideas central to her thought: democracy and militarism. She wrote a book about each.

Her book about democracy, Democracy and Social Ethics, was published in 1902 when she was 42. It was her first book and was developed out of a series of lectures she gave at several universities.

The way she presented her ideas were characteristic. The book’s apparent argument, captured in chapters about different types of hierarchical personal relationships, is that the ethic of benevolence was becoming old-fashioned. The introduction discusses democracy opaquely; otherwise, the words democracy and democratic are scattered across each chapter as rare passing references. The effect is of a woven tapestry, rather than a linear argument.

In her second book, about militarism, she does something similar. This book, too, is a collection of lectures. Entitled Newer Ideals of Peace, it was published in early 1907, when she was 46.

Despite the title, the book’s apparent argument is about the dangers of militarism. Her original contribution is the meaning she assigns the term. Like Herbert Spencer, she thought militarism was a worldview, but to Spencer it meant barbarism while to her it meant the belief that one group of people was superior to another group, and were willing to use almost any means, including force, to establish and maintain that superiority.

Most of the chapters were either about how militarism influenced city governments in the United States or about how militarism undercut efforts to achieve legislation on behalf of working adults and working children. Yet throughout the book she is also writing about the underlying attitudes that make war possible.

Her other point, strung across the book in passing references, was that the ethic of humanitarianism, the anti-militarist ethic, was spreading around the world and would eventually make war impossible. But by humanitarianism she did not mean having a kindly, helpful attitude towards those who suffered; she meant an ideal that fully honored the “great reservoirs of human ability” of those usually seen as inferior.

Addams can be fairly charged with avoiding linear logic in Newer Ideals. And others noticed. Some did not like it. Her friend George Herbert Mead, the sociologist, wrote, “One does not feel, in reading Miss Addams, the advance of an argument with measured tread.” But William James loved the way she made her case. After reading Newer Ideals he wrote to her that he found it “hard to express the good the book has done me in offering new view points and annihilating old ones. Yours is a deeply original mind and all so quiet and harmless! Yet revolutionary in the extreme.” I think that James, as usual, nailed it.

As you can see from what I have said, studying Addams’s ideas is not a straightforward matter. At times you wish she had made her arguments with what Mead called a “measured tread,” but more often you are grateful that she did not. She loved mystery, and she creates just enough of it on the page to make studying her a great deal of fun.

That said, the way she communicated her ideas -- as William James said, so quietly and harmlessly -- has probably contributed to her failure to attract much serious intellectual scholarship until recently. I can report, however, that prodded by several women scholars, philosophy has embraced Addams’s ideas as worthy of close study. It is my hope that the intellectual historians are not far behind.

***

Maria Cotera

On Boundary-Crossing and Women of Color Intellectuals

In keeping with the theme of the conference, the story I offer up here is a story of narratives that don’t “fit” --- or perhaps more precisely of the ways in which our predominant narratives about intellectual traditions are shaped by the critical boundaries, disciplinary norms, and aesthetic value-systems we have inherited, sometimes unthinkingly. It is also a story about boundary-crossers, women who themselves did not fit and who paid the price, both in terms of their careers and in terms of their legacies. I refer to the three subjects of my first book, Native Speakers, which focuses on the ethnographic and literary work of African American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, Sioux ethnologist Ella Cara Deloria, and Texas-Mexican folklorist Jovita González Mireles, all of whom were highly visible, even celebrated, figures in some of the most important intellectual and social movements of the early 20^th century, including the Boasian revolution in social sciences, the popularization of folklore studies, and the various ethnic renaissance movements that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding their high profiles in the 1930s and 1940s, these women were largely invisible by the late 1960s, when new cultural and scholarly currents might well have recuperated their legacies. So this is a story, too, of invisibility, and the ways in which the dominant disciplinary and conceptual frames that we use to categorize the past (even counter-hegemonic frames like feminist and ethnic nationalist optics) make capturing narratives that don’t fit all the more difficult.

Deloria, Hurston, and González came of age at a time in the early 20th century when interest in the other was at an all time high. Each capitalized on this interest, becoming celebrated spokeswomen for their communties and engaging in the scholarly and political currents of their time at a very high level. Ella Deloria worked closely with anthropologist Franz Boas, and later, after his death, with Ruth Benedict. For her own part, Hurston had a more contentious relationship with Boas, but she also worked with Benedict and perhaps more felicitously with Melville Herskovits, eventually finding her true home as a folklorist and Harlem Rennaissance writer. Jovita González, though less famous than Hurston, made quite a reputation for herself as a writer and folklorist in Texas, where as a student of J. Frank Dobie, the great white father of Texas Folklore Studies, she rose to become the presdient of the Texas Folklore Society in the early 1930s. While Deloria, Hurston, and González produced innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities and rose to prominence within the related fields of ethnology and folklore studies, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key junctures in their careers, and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women. Hurston’s novels, especially Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), are the most celebrated of the crossover works by these women, but Ella Deloria’s ethnographic novel Waterlily (published in 1988), and Jovita Gonzalez’s co-authored historical novel Caballero (1992), are, like Hurston’s work, vivid articulations of ethnographic and historical research in a different voice. This turn to the literary is not as suprising as it might seem. Indeed, as I argue in my book, it was the turn from “science“ to “fiction“ that enabled Deloria, Hurston and González to activate a feminist imaginary that was simply not possible in the social scientific writing of the 1930s, a mode of discourse that was still very much keyed to the self/other approach to “difference” of Objectivism. Unlike ethnographic narratives in which difference is described and delineated by a putatively distanced observer, literary works enable difference to articulate itself from a position of representational centrality. Which is to say that in Hurston, Deloria, and González‘s novels, difference is the authority and not the object. This boundary crossing, and this keying in to the “voice” of difference, through the mobilization of multiple registers of narrative practice, was for me the primary rationale for bringing these three very disparate intellectuals together.

Native feminist Paula Gunn Allen has argued that women of color intellectuals like Deloria, Hurston, and González have been “disappeared“ from our intellectual imaginary because the “border texts” that they produce in their strategic travels in and between different sites of struggle challenge the disciplinary, aesthetic, and ideological norms of both dominant and counter-hegemonic canons. Hurston, Deloria and González’s "ethnographic novels" offer particularly striking examples of the ways in which border texts surpass the disciplinary and ideological frameworks that constitute canons. Indeed, it is likely that their work remained invisible for so many years, precisely because as both formal experiments and ideological artifacts, they tested the conventional disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of the very institutional formations within which they might have found a home. Too literary to be considered credible "ethnographic texts" and too wedded to realism to conform to the aesthetic norms of literary modernism, Deloria, González and Hurston's ethnographic novels were exiled from both the history of anthropology and normative accounts of early twentieth century high modernism.

Until relatively recently, the prospect of recuperating Waterlily, Caballero, and Their Eyes Were Watching God within either "ethnic" or "feminist" literary canons seemed tenuous as well. Critical approaches to literary studies that arose in the 1960s alongside the establishment of Ethnic Studies programs generally ignored gender in their analyses of resistance narratives, and all too often relied on a binaric understanding of "resistance" and “opposition” that erased the complex and sometimes contradictory discursive and political locations of women of color. It’s worth noting that although Their Eyes Were Watching God was published to some critical acclaim in 1937 (the only one of these novels to be published during its author’s lifetime), the tepid and sometimes hostile reviews it received from the African American intelligentsia consigned the novel to a kind of literary purgatory out of which it did not emerge until Alice Walker and other Black feminists rescued it from the canonical margins in the 1970s. On the other hand, mainstream Anglo-feminist critical approaches emerging in the 1960s and 1970s all to often located “oppression” and “resistance” along an exclusively gendered axis, ignoring the effects of colonialism and racism on the lives of women of color. Waterlily, Caballero and Their Eyes Were Watching God challenge both the feminist and the ethnic nationalist ideological frameworks because they refuse oppositional binaries that center on either race or gender and thus undermine conventional notions of "resistance." While each undoubtedly illuminates difference--ethnic, racial or tribal--this illumination is complicated by a simultaneous attention to another order of difference, namely gender. And though gendered experience is central to each of these novels, they do not follow the common emancipatory scripts that we have come to desire from early 20^th century "feminist" literature.

Deloria, Hurston and González’s body of work defies easy disciplinary and ideological categorization, and therefore, to a certain extent, it also defies recuperation, but only if we allow ourselves to remain bounded by the categories and borders that have, until very recently, relegated their substantial contributions to the margins of intellectual history. Reflecting on my own recuperation of Deloria, Hurston and González’s work, I realize now that my approach to visibilizing their work was not simply a function of my political commitments to intersectionality and women of color feminism, but also a strategic response to the “slipperiness” of their interventions. Put another way, their work forced me to adopt their boundary-crossing ways, and articulate my own “border text”: an intellectual history situated in the borderlands between conventional accounts of anthropology, literature, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. In this sense, Deloria, Hurston and González reached across the divide of generations to shape their own history in my hand.

Perhaps the most dangerous border to cross for a scholar committed to the careful analysis of the past is the one that divides our theories about the world that has gone before us from the artifacts that give testimony to that world. To be sure, we construct our narratives about the past from these artifacts, but all to often, we approach them as evidence of the world as we already imagine it—a world organized in and through the boundaries of sense-making into discrete and recognizable units: quasi-familial “circles of influence”, canons, traditions and schools of thought that in their very boundedness cannot capture, much less incorporate, articulations of reality that stand outside of their logics like a kind of excess. But this “excess”, if we are open to its own sense-making logic, can reveal new networks of knowing, and new terrains of consciousness that are perhaps incipient, but nevertheless present in the past.

Final Plenary on American Exceptionalism

For those who missed the conference or who missed the final plenary, I offer a couple of photos. Above and to the left, Ben Alpers introduces Mike O'Connor who chaired the plenary. Above and to the right, the panel: (L-R) Eric Foner, Beth Bailey, Michael Kazin, and Rogers Smith.

The idea for the plenary sprang from a post of Ben's and took shape under Mike's direction. The turn out was solid for a Friday evening in NYC. A lively question and answer session followed an interesting exchange among the panelists.

Of the many themes addressed over a couple of hours, two stayed with me: all the panelists made note of the need to place whatever might be considered American exceptionalism in an international context. To that end, Eric Foner mentioned Ian Tyrell's work a few times. See Tyrrell's website.

The other theme was the production of usable myths that accord with ideas of American exceptionalism--a point raised most clearly and succinctly by Beth Bailey. I have wondered in posts on this blog what Americans think the American military is doing when it goes overseas, and what the nation's soldiers think they are killing and dying for, if not for a theology of American exceptionalism?

While I have argued that civil religion covers this idea more comprehensively, Beth Bailey made some very serious points regarding the construction and consequences of ideas wrapped up in the exceptionalist narrative.

Pauline Maier Introduction

For those unfortunate souls who missed the fourth annual USIH conference--the best yet--I'll kick off the blog discussion of the conference, which figures to be intense, by posting my prepared introduction of Pauline Maier's keynote address. Maier's talk was simply wonderful.
---------------
November 18, 2011

Welcome everyone! It is my great honor to introduce this year’s keynote speaker. This is the first conference hosted by the brand new Society for U.S. Intellectual History, about which I am extremely proud. However, this is the Fourth Annual U.S. History Conference.

I’d like to give a very brief history of our keynotes. At the first, held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we did not have a keynote speaker. That would have been presumptuous, even for us.

At the second, held here at the Graduate Center, James Livingston gave our first keynote address. It was a fascinating talk on how recent directions in intellectual history were foreshadowed by developments in popular culture, including cartoons. One of the more memorable moments came during the Q&A, when Eric Alterman shouted at Livingston from the back of the room, accusing him of badly misinterpreting the film Hurt Locker. Alterman then used his regular column in The Nation to further hammer home his point about Livingston’s supposed fanciful interpretations. (Note: As those in attendance know, this moment during the introduction was memorable--and embarrassing for me--since Alterman walked into the room just as I mentioned his name. Thanks to Ben Alpers for pointing out his presence!)

At last year’s conference, also hosted here at the Graduate Center, James Kloppenberg gave our keynote. It was a rousing overview of his book Reading Obama. The talk was featured in a New York Times article by Patricia Cohen, in which I was quoted as saying that the audience found the talk so fascinating because Obama’s education—his introduction to traditions of American thought, such as pragmatism and republicanism—seemed very similar to our own. The right-wing blogosphere used that article as evidence that Obama is an elitist and that academics are a bunch of sycophants. We couldn’t have scripted it any better.

It thus seems that giving our keynote is a great occasion to become the subject of a minor controversy. Since any publicity is good publicity, and since we don’t yet have any money, we found our selling point!

On that note, it is my great pleasure to introduce this year’s keynote, Dr. Pauline Maier, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Maier received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968 and has since published several important books about America’s revolutionary era. These include: From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776; The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams; and American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. Her latest book, published last year by Simon and Shuster, is Ratification. The People Debate the Constitution. 1787-1788.

In a recent review of Ratification in the American Historical Review, Frank Cogliano writes that: “Maier deploys narrative as a methodology in order to recreate the major debates over the Constitution and to chart the ebb and flow of the ratification struggle.” It would thus seem that this year’s conference committee, Ray Haberski, Ben Alpers, and our chair, Mike O’Connor, did a brilliant job of matching the keynote to the conference theme of “Narratives.” Well done! Please help me welcome Pauline Maier.

Registering for the Fourth Annual USIH Conference

The Fourth Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference and Annual Meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History will be held on November 17 and 18, 2011, at CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

The program of the conference can be found here.

Those participating in or planning to attend the conference are asked to register by November 11. You can register online (and pay with credit card via PayPal) here, or you can mail a check for $60.00 to the following address:

Ana Bozicevic
Program Manager
The Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5103
New York, NY 10016

Please make your checks out to The Graduate Center Foundation.

If you're registering by mail, along with your check, please include a separate sheet with your name, affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. In addition to covering the costs of conference space, this fee will cover refreshments during the conference.

Those on the program are also required to be members of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. While not required to be members, those simply attending the conference are also encouraged to join. Our organization is in its first year and is not yet, unfortunately, living in the digital age. So you'll have to fill out a form by hand, and send us a check. To become a member, complete the membership form and send a check or money order for $40 (payable to the Society for U.S. Intellectual History) to:

Raymond Haberski, Jr.
Secretary, S-USIH
Marian University
Marian Hall 307
3200 Cold Spring Road
Indianapolis, IN 46222

Registering for the Fourth Annual USIH Conference

The Fourth Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference and Annual Meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History will be held on November 17 and 18, 2011, at CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

The program of the conference can be found here.

Those participating in or planning to attend the conference are asked to register by November 11. You can register online (and pay with credit card via PayPal) here, or you can mail a check for $60.00 to the following address:

Ana Bozicevic
Program Manager
The Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5103
New York, NY 10016

Please make your checks out to The Graduate Center Foundation.

If you're registering by mail, along with your check, please include a separate sheet with your name, affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. In addition to covering the costs of conference space, this fee will cover refreshments during the conference.

Those on the program are also required to be members of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. While not required to be members, those simply attending the conference are also encouraged to join. Our organization is in its first year and is not yet, unfortunately, living in the digital age. So you'll have to fill out a form by hand, and send us a check. To become a member, complete the membership form and send a check or money order for $40 (payable to the Society for U.S. Intellectual History) to:

Raymond Haberski, Jr.
Secretary, S-USIH
Marian University
Marian Hall 307
3200 Cold Spring Road
Indianapolis, IN 46222

The Conference Panel as Academic Technology

As a member of this year's USIH conference committee, I've been doing a lot of thinking in recent months about what makes academic conferences work.  Thanks to vast changes in digital technology, scholars have many more ways to share work than we did even fifteen years ago. Yet I think most of us continue to find academic conferences, at least well focused and organized ones, very valuable.  For me at least, the explosion in methods of communicating ideas with each other has helped me better distinguish what conferences offer that we don't get  from journals, blogs, listservs, social media, YouTube and the many other methods of scholarly transmission. 

What distinguishes conferences, at least good ones, from these other, often newer, technologies, is the exchange of ideas that takes at them. The first ingredient of this exchange is interesting people doing interesting work in areas of mutual interest. Good conferences attract such people as both participants and attendees. Often they're sharing work that is in its earliest, most protean form. And though exchanges take place not only in sessions, but outside of them--over lunch, dinner, and drinks--the life of a good conference should be the panels themselves.


The best panels feature interesting individual projects that somehow speak to each other and a respondent who is able to somehow tie them together. But most important of all, I think, is the discussion that follows the papers and the response. After all, many of the other technologies that I mentioned work fine as means of exchanging papers.  We can even watch whole conferences on YouTube these days. But we still need to be in the room to participate fully in that discussion.*

I've been meaning to blog a bit on the panel as an academic technology, in part because of a post by Paul Campos entitled "Why Do People Read Papers at Conferences?" that appeared several weeks ago on Lawyers, Guns, and Money, one of my favorite semi-academic blogs.**  Campos decried the practice of reading conference papers and received overwhelming agreement from his commentariat on this point.

I, however, want to mount at least a semi-defense of reading conference papers.

We've all had the experience of sitting in the audience as someone reads a conference paper badly.  We've all experienced papers that weren't written to be read out loud, that were wildly too long (leading to their being cut on the fly or, what's worse, simply taking up way more than the allotted time), or that were simply delivered in a way that was entirely soporific. A conference paper is a theatrical form, and like any piece of theatre, it can be badly written or performed. With that much I agree.

But reading from a prepared text makes sense for a variety of reasons. It makes it more likely that complicated ideas will be communicated precisely. Due to their brief length, conference papers require more concision than journal articles or books. Due to their oral presentation, they require even greater clarity of expression.  Writing down one's remarks in advance makes both of these things more likely. Moreover a conference paper written-to-be-delivered is one of the few ways to assure that the panel's respondent will be commenting on what the audience will actually have heard.

Now it should also be said that history is somewhat different from other fields when it comes to the significance of conference papers. More than any other discipline, historians tend to focus on producing books. A paper, even a published journal article, is very often part of a much longer work. In the sciences, hard social sciences, and even some other humanities, academic papers play a more important role as scholarly end products.  My sense is that in many of these other fields, conference papers are, almost by definition, shorter versions of longer scholarly papers, rather than stand-alone think pieces or parts of much larger projects.  My guess is this fact plays a role in how especially unpopular the practice of reading conference papers is outside of our discipline.

A final thought on the conference panel:  what I think of as the standard conference session--three (sometimes four) papers followed by a comment and discussion from the audience--is an incredibly entrenched format.

For as long as I've been attending scholarly conferences (which is now over twenty years), conferences have attempted to encourage scholars to present their work in non-traditional formats.***  This year's USIH conference committee tried to encourage such formats.  But other than a couple brown bags and a handful of roundtables (two of the more traditional alternative formats), nobody took us up on the suggestion.****

So despite occasionally griping about the format, historians, at least, seem fairly wedded to the traditional conference panel.

What do you see as the upsides and downsides of conference, panels and papers (read aloud or otherwise)?  What makes a conference a valuable experience?  How might we improve the format of conferences in the future?
_____________________
* And, no, I don't think even live teleconferencing provides the same experience.  Intellectual discussions are fundamentally embodied things. The really experience the best such discussions, you need to be in the room.

** The writers on LGM are all academics, but the focus of the blog is usually not academic.

*** In the early '90s, poster sessions seemed to be very popular. I never understood the point of these for most historical projects. 

**** I've always been a fan of session which discuss pre-circulated papers. This is the format of Princeton's Davis Seminar.  In many ways, it distills what's best about conferences, turning the entire session into an intensive exchange of ideas. It also allows for the discussion of longer works of scholarship than a conference paper. Its main downside is that those who fail to read the paper in advance are largely left out of the conversation. I would have loved to have one or more such sessions at USIH 2011, but none were proposed.

The Conference Panel as Academic Technology

As a member of this year's USIH conference committee, I've been doing a lot of thinking in recent months about what makes academic conferences work.  Thanks to vast changes in digital technology, scholars have many more ways to share work than we did even fifteen years ago. Yet I think most of us continue to find academic conferences, at least well focused and organized ones, very valuable.  For me at least, the explosion in methods of communicating ideas with each other has helped me better distinguish what conferences offer that we don't get  from journals, blogs, listservs, social media, YouTube and the many other methods of scholarly transmission. 

What distinguishes conferences, at least good ones, from these other, often newer, technologies, is the exchange of ideas that takes at them. The first ingredient of this exchange is interesting people doing interesting work in areas of mutual interest. Good conferences attract such people as both participants and attendees. Often they're sharing work that is in its earliest, most protean form. And though exchanges take place not only in sessions, but outside of them--over lunch, dinner, and drinks--the life of a good conference should be the panels themselves.


The best panels feature interesting individual projects that somehow speak to each other and a respondent who is able to somehow tie them together. But most important of all, I think, is the discussion that follows the papers and the response. After all, many of the other technologies that I mentioned work fine as means of exchanging papers.  We can even watch whole conferences on YouTube these days. But we still need to be in the room to participate fully in that discussion.*

I've been meaning to blog a bit on the panel as an academic technology, in part because of a post by Paul Campos entitled "Why Do People Read Papers at Conferences?" that appeared several weeks ago on Lawyers, Guns, and Money, one of my favorite semi-academic blogs.**  Campos decried the practice of reading conference papers and received overwhelming agreement from his commentariat on this point.

I, however, want to mount at least a semi-defense of reading conference papers.

We've all had the experience of sitting in the audience as someone reads a conference paper badly.  We've all experienced papers that weren't written to be read out loud, that were wildly too long (leading to their being cut on the fly or, what's worse, simply taking up way more than the allotted time), or that were simply delivered in a way that was entirely soporific. A conference paper is a theatrical form, and like any piece of theatre, it can be badly written or performed. With that much I agree.

But reading from a prepared text makes sense for a variety of reasons. It makes it more likely that complicated ideas will be communicated precisely. Due to their brief length, conference papers require more concision than journal articles or books. Due to their oral presentation, they require even greater clarity of expression.  Writing down one's remarks in advance makes both of these things more likely. Moreover a conference paper written-to-be-delivered is one of the few ways to assure that the panel's respondent will be commenting on what the audience will actually have heard.

Now it should also be said that history is somewhat different from other fields when it comes to the significance of conference papers. More than any other discipline, historians tend to focus on producing books. A paper, even a published journal article, is very often part of a much longer work. In the sciences, hard social sciences, and even some other humanities, academic papers play a more important role as scholarly end products.  My sense is that in many of these other fields, conference papers are, almost by definition, shorter versions of longer scholarly papers, rather than stand-alone think pieces or parts of much larger projects.  My guess is this fact plays a role in how especially unpopular the practice of reading conference papers is outside of our discipline.

A final thought on the conference panel:  what I think of as the standard conference session--three (sometimes four) papers followed by a comment and discussion from the audience--is an incredibly entrenched format.

For as long as I've been attending scholarly conferences (which is now over twenty years), conferences have attempted to encourage scholars to present their work in non-traditional formats.***  This year's USIH conference committee tried to encourage such formats.  But other than a couple brown bags and a handful of roundtables (two of the more traditional alternative formats), nobody took us up on the suggestion.****

So despite occasionally griping about the format, historians, at least, seem fairly wedded to the traditional conference panel.

What do you see as the upsides and downsides of conference, panels and papers (read aloud or otherwise)?  What makes a conference a valuable experience?  How might we improve the format of conferences in the future?
_____________________
* And, no, I don't think even live teleconferencing provides the same experience.  Intellectual discussions are fundamentally embodied things. The really experience the best such discussions, you need to be in the room.

** The writers on LGM are all academics, but the focus of the blog is usually not academic.

*** In the early '90s, poster sessions seemed to be very popular. I never understood the point of these for most historical projects. 

**** I've always been a fan of session which discuss pre-circulated papers. This is the format of Princeton's Davis Seminar.  In many ways, it distills what's best about conferences, turning the entire session into an intensive exchange of ideas. It also allows for the discussion of longer works of scholarship than a conference paper. Its main downside is that those who fail to read the paper in advance are largely left out of the conversation. I would have loved to have one or more such sessions at USIH 2011, but none were proposed.

A Short Note on the Creation of the USIH 4.0 Conference Program

On behalf of the other members of the Conference Committee--Committee Chair Mike O'Connor and Ray Haberski--I just wanted to publicly thank everyone who submitted papers or panels to this years conference. We had a dramatic increase in the number of submissions this year, which was both a blessing and a curse. Mike, Ray, and I strove, first and foremost, to create the best conference we could. This involved creating coherent panels, while making sure that a wide diversity of scholars working on as wide a range of topics as possible were represented.  We're very happy with the result, but we know that many excellent proposals couldn't be fit into the program.  Those accepted--and rejected--from the conference received private notice of their fate a couple weeks ago. But as we are finally able to publish the schedule today, I felt that it was worth adding this little note on the process.

A Short Note on the Creation of the USIH 4.0 Conference Program

On behalf of the other members of the Conference Committee--Committee Chair Mike O'Connor and Ray Haberski--I just wanted to publicly thank everyone who submitted papers or panels to this years conference. We had a dramatic increase in the number of submissions this year, which was both a blessing and a curse. Mike, Ray, and I strove, first and foremost, to create the best conference we could. This involved creating coherent panels, while making sure that a wide diversity of scholars working on as wide a range of topics as possible were represented.  We're very happy with the result, but we know that many excellent proposals couldn't be fit into the program.  Those accepted--and rejected--from the conference received private notice of their fate a couple weeks ago. But as we are finally able to publish the schedule today, I felt that it was worth adding this little note on the process.

Program: Fourth Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference

Society for U.S. Intellectual History

2011 Conference and Annual Meeting

The Graduate Center

CUNY

November 17 and 18, 2011

Conference Program
(Registration information can be found here.)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17

Business Meeting, 9:00-10:30 a.m. (C197)

	Society for U.S. Intellectual History Executive Committee Annual Meeting Introduction of meeting by Ray Haberski, 2011 conference committee Open to all S-USIH members

Coffee & Tea, Proshansky Lobby, 9:30 a.m.

Session A, 10:00-11:45 a.m.

Panel A1 C201	Psychology, Psychiatry and American Social Thought Daniel Wickberg, University of Texas at Dallas “Sympathy and Self-Hatred in American Social Thought” Simon Taylor, Columbia University “The Influence of Anxiety: American Psychiatry and the Culture of Dread, 1950-1970” Voichita Ileana Nachescu, Raritan Valley Community College “Radical Feminism and the Psychotherapeutic Sensibility of the 1960s” Chair/Commentator: Heather Murray, University of Ottawa
Panel A2 C202	An Intellectual History of Media Policy: Narratives of the Public Interest in the Age of Commercial Media Victor Pickard, University of Pennsylvania “Social Democracy or Corporate Libertarianism?: The Postwar Collision of Narrative and Logic in U.S. Media Policy” Allison Perlman, University of California-Irvine “Equality of Opportunity or Equalization: Educational Television, Policy Discourse, and Segregation” Kyle Riismandel, New Jersey Institute of Technology “The V-Chip and Suburban Regulation of Media” Chair/Commentator: Richard John, Columbia University
Panel A3 C203	American Slavery: Reinforcements and Reactions Peter Wirzbicki, New York University “Transcendentalism and the Fugitive Slave Act” Vanessa Varin, Louisiana State University “Myth and Power: The Relationship Between Fiction and Capital Justice in the Early South” Gregory Matthew Adkins, Columbus State Community College “Neoclassical Philosophy and Antislavery” Chair/Commentator: Charles Capper, Boston University
Panel A4 C204	Twentieth-Century European Thought in American Contexts Anthony Chaney, The University of Texas at Dallas “The Double Bind in the Postwar Era” Eric Brandom, Duke University “Violence and Naïveté: Georges Sorel and the Narration of the American 1960s” Pehr Englén, Drew University “What the Paul de Man Affair Illustrates” Chair/Commentator: Christopher Brooks, East Stroudsburg University
Panel A5 C205	Configuring the Cold War: Constructive Courtroom Narratives in Dennis et al v. United States, 1949 (Roundtable) Chair: Ellen Schrecker, Yeshiva University Lisa Davis, Independent Scholar Barbara Falk, Canadian Forces College / RMC Fred Jerome, Independent Scholar

“Brown Bag” Session (Lunch Provided), 12:00 noon-1:00 p.m. (C197)

A Perspective on the State of the Field of Intellectual History Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University “Ideas: The Preserve of Intellectuals?” Comment: Robert Westbrook, University of Rochester

Coffee & Tea, Proshansky Lobby, 1:00 p.m.

Session B, 1:15-3:00 p.m.

Panel B1 C201	Intellectual History and Art: Aesthetics, Reception and Social Practice George Cotkin, California Polytechnic State University “In Search of Moby-Dick: A Novel and Its Readers” Joan Rubin, University of Rochester “Ideology and Practice in the Career of Robert Shaw” Michael Kimmage, Catholic University “Philip Roth’s American Tragedy” Chair/Commentator: Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
Panel B2 C202	Narratives of Transition, Reaction and Conversion: Liberal Intellectual Responses to the Sixties Tim Lacy, Monmouth College “Reactionary Liberalism: Mortimer J. Adler’s Post-Sixties Faith in the ‘American Testament’” Bryn Upton, McDaniel College “Leftist Legacies: How Personal Politics and Memoir are Rewriting the 1960s” Daniel Geary, Trinity College Dublin “Children of the Lonely Crowd: David Riesman, Liberalism, and Youth Revolt in the 1960s” [The panelist is unable to attend. His paper will be read by the chair.] Chair/Commentator: Howard Brick, University of Michigan
Panel B3 C203	Defining Disciplines at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Ethan Miller, Freie Universitat Berlin “Culture and the Cosmopolitan Historical Consciousness of Franz Boas” Peter Olen, University of South Florida “Method as Madness: American Philosophy’s Tortured Narrative of ‘Progress’” Emilie Raymer, University of Chicago “Thorstein Veblen as Scientist: The Case for The Theory of the Leisure Class as a Scientific Text” Chair/Commentator: Andrew Jewett, Harvard University
Panel B4 C204	Islands in the Southern Stream? Safety, Sublimation and Interracialism on Black College Campuses, 1874-1930 Jennifer Eckel, University of Texas “‘And Thy Neighbor as Thyself’: Atlanta University Sociology and Lugenia Burns Hope's Neighborhood Union” Lauren Kientz Anderson, University of Kentucky “A Nauseating Sentiment, a Magical Device, or a Real Insight? Interracialism at Fisk University in 1930” Chair/Commentator: James A. Levy, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater
Panel B5 C205	Narratives of Sickness, Captivity and Disaster in Early America Samantha Steele, Western Michigan University “The Captivity of Hannah Duston: Using Literature to Map the Changing Patterns of Native Americans in New England Society” Ken Kurihara, Fordham University “Angel of Home on the Sea: Gender and 19th Century Shipwreck Narratives” Julia Mansfield, Stanford University “Drawing Conclusions: Maps and Myths in Disease Narratives of the Early Republic” Chair/commentator: Amy Wood, Illinois State University

Session C, 3:15-5:00 p.m.

Panel C1 C201	Intellectual Life of the 1920s David Farber, Temple University “Capitalist Intellectuals: The Case of John Raskob in the 1920s” David Greenberg, Rutgers University “A Pruned and Temperate Democratic Theory: The Lippmann-Mencken Debate” Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University “The Roots of Twentieth-Century Cultural Criticism in 1920s America” Chair/Commentator: Neil Jumonville, Florida State University
Panel C2 C202	God and War in Twentieth-Century America Raymond Haberski, Marian University “‘The Best Game in Town’: How Richard John Neuhaus Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love War” Robert Vanderlan, Cornell University “Obliteration: The ‘Debate’ Over Strategic Bombing During World War II” Charles Richter, George Washington University “On to Armageddon!: The Apocalyptic Rhetoric of the Assemblies of God in the Interwar Years” Chair/Commentator: Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania
Panel C3 C203	Biography, Autobiography and Memoir in American Intellectual History Mark Smith, University of Texas at Austin “What Makes a Good Biography from an Intellectual History Perspective?: Grappling with Richmond Pearson Hobson” Steven Weiland, Michigan State University “Academic Autobiography and Intellectual History: The Late Life Register of Stanley Cavell” Kathryn Telling, University of Nottingham “‘Unfree, Uncourageous, and Radically Uneducated’: Mary Daly’s Changing Relation to Institutionalized Education, 1968-2006” Chair/Commentator: Marilyn Fischer, University of Dayton
Panel C4 C204	Science, Narrative and Intellectual Authority in Cold War America David Hecht, Bowdoin College “Narratives and Numbers: Social Science and Intellectual Imagination in Cold War America” Paul Rubinson, Bridgewater State University “A Scientific Apocalypse: Politics, Objectivity and the Narrative of Nuclear Winter” Audra Wolfe, Independent Scholar “Science, Freedom and the American Way” Chair/Commentator: Paul Erickson, Wesleyan University
Panel C5 C205	That 70s Panel Peter-Christian Aigner, City University of New York “Rethinking Daniel Patrick Moynihan” Jordan Grant, American University “Meaning in the Malaise: Boredom and the Remaking of the American Mind in the Seventies” Alissa Wilkinson, The King’s College “Building Christian Bookstores in the Bunker: Francis Schaeffer, American Evangelicals, and the Genesis of a Subculture” Chair/Commentator: Samuel Zipp, Brown University

Plenary Event, 6:00-8:00 p.m. (C201-202)

U.S. Women’s Intellectual Traditions (Roundtable) Introduction of panel by Mike O’Connor, chair, 2011 conference committee Chair: Louise W. Knight, Northwestern University Maria Cotera, University of Michigan Megan Marshall, Emerson College Philippa Strum, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Sherie M. Randolph, University of Michigan

Reception in Honor of the Founding of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, Brendan's (42 W 35th Street), 8:30-10:30 p.m.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18

Coffee & Tea, Proshansky Lobby, 8:30 a.m.

Session D, 9:00-10:45 a.m.

Panel D1 C201	New Narratives of the Second World War (Roundtable) Chair: Beth Bailey, Temple University Citizen and State: James Sparrow, University of Chicago Time and Place: Brooke L. Blower, Boston University Race and Nation: Nico Slate, Carnegie Mellon University
Panel D2 C202	Religion and Secularization in the Nineteenth Century Michael Lee, Eastern University “Narratives of Deism in Early America” Mary Kupiec Cayton, Miami University “Secularism and U.S. National Narratives: Reframing the Second Great Awakening” Andrea Turpin, Baylor University “Articulating the Moral Purposes of Women’s Higher Education: Comparing Secularization at Wellesley and Bryn Mawr Colleges” Chair/Commentator: Christopher Shannon, Christendom College
Panel D3 C203	Intellectual Friendships in the Twentieth Century David Weinfeld, New York University “‘Some of My Best Friends Are Black, Some of My Best Friends Are Jewish’: The Friendship of Alain Locke and Horace Kallen” Kevin M. Schultz, University of Illinois at Chicago “Ideas as Weapons: Understanding the 1960s Through Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr.” Camelia Lenart, University at Albany “A Different ‘Special Relationship’: Martha Graham and the British Cultural Luminaries John Gielgud, E. M. Forster, and Henry Moore” Chair/Commentator: Kenneth Bindas, Kent State University
Panel D4 C204	Gender and American Conservatism Adam Laats, Binghamton University “‘Postwar Conservatism?’: The Roots of the American Conservative Movement and the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, 1919-1939” Stacie Taranto, Ramapo College of New Jersey “Conservative Intellectual Thought, Suburban Housewives, and ‘Family Values’” Ronnie Avital Grinberg, University of Colorado at Boulder “The New York Intellectuals, Masculinity, and the Roots of Neoconservatism” Chair/Commentator: Alyson Cole, Queens College
Panel D5 C205	Universities and Democracy Julian Nemeth, Brandeis University “Looking in from the Outside: Communist Critiques of the Postwar Academy” Julie Reuben, Harvard University “Social Scientists and the Post-World War II General Education Movement” Joy Rohde, Trinity University "From Expert Democracy to Beltway Banditry: How the Anti-War Movement Expanded the Military-Academic-Industrial Complex" Chair/Commentator: Thomas Bender, New York University

Session E, 11:00 a.m.-12:45 p.m.

Panel E1 C198	Niebuhr, America, and the World William Inboden, University of Texas-Austin “Niebuhr and American Intervention in World War II” Andrew Preston, Cambridge University “Niebuhr and International Organizations during the Cold War” Healan Gaston, Harvard University “Niebuhr and Judeo-Christian Identity in America” Chair/Commentator: Gary Dorrien, Union Theological Seminary
Panel E2 C201	Narrative, History and Social Movements Daniel Hurewitz, Hunter College “‘Those Faggots—We’d Have Nothing to Do With Them!’: Gay Activists’ Resistance to Allying Themselves with a Transgender Community” Michelle Moravec, Rosemont College “Fictive Histories of the Feminine: Lyotard, Habermas and Feminist Manifestos” Eric Larson, Harvard University “Decline and Dissent: The U.S. Labor Left and National Decline in the 1980s” Chair/Commentator: Mary Ellen Lennon, Marian University
Panel E3 C202	Behavior, Personality, and the Self in Twentieth-Century American Social Thought David Varel, University of Colorado-Boulder “Personality Testing and the Problem of the Individual in American ‘Mass’ Society, 1917-1950” David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University “‘Hollo, I must lie here no longer’: The Assertion of the Self from the Will to Believe to the Me Decade” Ethan Schrum, University of Virginia “Institutionalizing the Behavioral Revolution: James G. March and Social Science at the University of California-Irvine in the 1960s” Chair/Comment: Leo P. Ribuffo, The George Washington University
Panel E4 C203	The Founding Era as Subject and Object of Narrative Jonathan Wilfred Wilson, Syracuse University “The Pictorial Scholarship of Benson Lossing: Visualizing the Public in Antebellum Historical Writing” Alin Fumurescu, Tulane University “Narratives of Representation and Compromise During the American Founding” Jeffrey Malanson, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne “‘If I had it in his Hand-Writing I would burn it’: The Authorship Controversy over George Washington’s Farewell Address” Chair/Commentator: Christopher McKnight Nichols, University of Pennsylvania
Panel E5 C204	Literary Turns: Art, Politics and Philosophy Marlene Clark, City College of New York “Framing a Story: Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing” Lisa Szefel, University of the Pacific "The ‘Literary Turn’ in Postwar American Politics” Martin Woessner, City College of New York “Literary Turns in Recent American Philosophy: Cavell, Nussbaum, and Rorty” Chair/Commentator: Paul Croce, Stetson University

Panel E6 C205

Liberals and Conservatives at Mid-Century Anne Kornhauser, City College of New York “Resituating Hayek: Hayek, Twentieth Century Liberalism and the Rule-of-Law Ideal in 1940s America” Maria Fedorova, Washington State University “Anti-Intellectual Discourse Within Historical Narratives in the 1950s” Chair/Commentator: Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, University of Southern Denmark

“Brown Bag” Session (Lunch Provided), 1:00-2:00 p.m. (C197)

Paul Goodman Changed My Life (screening and discussion) Excerpts from the feature film documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life (2011) Jonathan Lee, Director and Producer Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University Michael Fisher, University of Rochester Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study

Coffee & Tea, Proshansky Lobby, 2:00 p.m.

Keynote Address, 2:15-3:45 p.m. (C201-202)

Society for U.S. Intellectual History 2011 Conference Keynote Address Introduction of the speaker by S-USIH President Andrew Hartman Pauline Maier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Ratification: Bringing Ideas Down to Earth”

Session F, 4:00-5:45 p.m.

Panel F1 C198	Daniel Rodgers’s Age of Fracture (Roundtable) Chair: Benjamin L. Alpers, University of Oklahoma Mary Dudziak, University of Southern California Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University James Livingston, Rutgers University Lisa Szefel, University of the Pacific Respondent: Daniel Rodgers, Princeton University
Panel F2 C203	To Build a New Man: Elites, Progressives and American Higher Education Catherine Liu, University of California, Irvine “The Meritocracy Narrative” Brian Ingrassia, Middle Tennessee State University “To ‘find and teach a new way of life’: Critics of Intercollegiate Football and the Rejection of Progressive Era Education, 1919-1939” Robert Thomas, Columbia University “Designs for Living: Robert Redfield, the Reconciliation of the Cultural and Social Sciences at Chicago in the 1940s, and Postwar Conservative-Liberal Ideology” Chair/Commentator: John Louis Recchiuti, University of Mount Union
Panel F3 C204	Confrontations and Interventions in American Aesthetic Thought Robert Genter, Nassau Community College “Robert Rauschenberg and the Politics of Confession” Clay Matlin, University of Rochester “Barnett Newman and the New Sublime” Sam Huntington, University of Rochester “‘Grotesque Fidelity:’ Thomas Nast and the Aesthetics of Caricature” Chair/Commentator: T.J. Jackson Lears, Rutgers University
Panel F4 C197	Traveling Minds: Rethinking Intellectual Transfer Between Europe and the US (Roundtable) Chair: James Kloppenberg, Harvard University Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison Jeremy Blatter, Harvard University Henry M. Cowles, Princeton University Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University
Panel F5 C205	The Intellectual Framework for the Religious Right: Creating Narratives of Alienation in the 1960s and 1970s Daniel K. Williams, University of West Georgia “The Quest for a Theology of Life: Catholic and Evangelical Intellectuals and the Abortion Issue in the 1960s and 1970s” Robert Daniel Rubin, Keene State College “Putting the Court in Its Crosshairs” Emma J. Long, University of Kent “Evangelicals, the Supreme Court, and the First Amendment: Reconsidering the ‘Wall of Separation’” Chair/Commentator: R. Laurence Moore, Cornell University

Wine & Cheese Reception, 5:45-7:00 p.m.

Plenary Event, 7:00-9:00 p.m. (ERH)

American Exceptionalism: History and Politics (Roundtable) Introduction of panel by Ben Alpers, 2011 conference committee Chair: Mike O’Connor, Georgia State University Beth Bailey, Temple University Eric Foner, Columbia University Michael Kazin, Georgetown University Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania