Substance, Style, and Cold War Liberalism

Kevin Mattson’s reply to my provocations (I and II) was fantastic. I concede to Mattson on several points. For instance, I agree about the centrality of McCarthyism to postwar conservatism, which is particularly apropos given that Irving Kristol, the “father of neoconservatism,” made a halfhearted defense of McCarthy on the grounds that liberals could not be trusted to wage the Cold War. 

Yet, I stand by many of my original arguments, especially over the centrality of neoconservatism to the culture wars. This argument rests on my belief that the sixties represent a significant break, that the New Left is crucial to understanding the later culture wars, and that neoconservatism took form precisely in opposition to the New Left. In their reaction to the New Left and in their full-throated attack on those intellectuals who comprised, in Lionel Trilling’s words, an “adversary culture,” neoconservatives helped draw up the very terms of the culture wars. But since I have made that argument on this blog several times and would like to save some of my material for my book, I will let this debate go for now.

The one point of contention that I would like to return to, however, is the ongoing discussion about style and substance. Bill Fine’s many comments on this topic, as well as LD Burnett’s posts (here and here), have inspired me to think through where I stand on the style-substance spectrum in relation to Cold War liberalism. Both Mattson and LD claim that the New Left and the New Right evinced similar styles, implying that this fact is more important to our historical understanding of these two ideological trajectories than any political differences they might have had. I disagree.

In Rebels All!, Mattson argues that American conservatives are the true heirs to sixties radicals. Conservatives are the ones who carried on their legacy of anti-establishment utopianism. In this elocution, style matters. Such rebellious sensibilities stood in marked contrast to the political style that Mattson holds dear, the style of Cold War liberalism. Mattson appreciates the insights offered by postwar liberalism: “That irony and humility are necessary guards against self-assured expansion of American power. That style, the way you hold your ideas and worldview, often guide the way you do things in the world.”

Similarly, in her recent post—“Common Ground for the Culture Wars”—LD contends that William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and Tom Hayden’s "Port Huron Statement" evinced strikingly similar sensibilities, particularly in their notions about the moral and political centrality of the university. Both Buckley and Hayden believed the university was worth fighting for, and in this fight they both saw themselves as doing battle with a corrupt system otherwise known as Cold War liberalism. That their critiques arose from divergent political views is less important than understanding their shared sensibilities.

Mattson points out that perhaps our main difference is over politics. Mattson writes: “He appears much more of a leftist; I’m a liberal. Some of his criticisms seem less about the substance of my own argument and getting things wrong and more with my own political conclusions.” Mattson is half correct here. Indeed, we do disagree about politics. He correctly mentions that we have different takes on historian-activist Howard Zinn, which seems to be a Rorschach test for left-leaning historians these days. Fair enough. (If you want my opinion on this matter, see my reading of Michael Kazin, who is chief among Zinn’s left-leaning critics.)

But I would argue that Mattson and my political differences do not merely lead me to dislike the conclusions he draws from history. I think it leads him to get the history wrong. This is particularly the case with his conflation of the sixties left with the post-sixties right, which seems to stem from his defense of Cold War liberalism. In this, Mattson repeats the Cold War liberal move, made most famously by Schlesinger in The Vital Center: he concludes that political ideas to the left and right of liberalism are non-sensible. Whereas Schlesinger and the consensus thinkers of the 1950s misapplied psychoanalytic theory to argue that non-liberal political views were crazy, Mattson argues that the rebellious style, whether a fashion of the left or the right, is antithetical to the good democratic society.

As far as I can tell, LD’s analysis of postwar sensibilities does not originate from any such political passion. And yet, in her historiographic commitments, she prioritizes the wrong thing. The point that Buckley and Hayden both opposed aspects of the university establishment, and in doing so were part of a larger counter-zeitgeist, is banal. Given that the university was central to the Cold War liberal project, and given that Cold War liberalism was hegemonic (there’s a reason it was called the consensus), all critics, left or right, might seem like “rebels all.” They were rebelling against powerful institutions, undergirded by powerful ideas. But their differences are more important to our historical understanding.

Buckley saw the university as an anti-traditionalist, anti-religious, secularizing institution. As such, his critique nicely anticipated the Christian Right’s war for the soul of America that took on added valence in the 1970s and after. Hayden, in contrast, saw the university as the soulless representation of a technocratic capitalism. Both critiques were compelling. Both spoke to the various weaknesses of Cold War liberalism. And both had later consequences. But they were substantially different. 

That both left and right offered withering criticisms of Cold War liberalism might say a lot about Cold War liberalism. But only by analyzing the specific substance of the respective criticisms do we learn about left and right and, consequently, about the culture wars that resulted from the crumbling of Cold War liberalism.

Reading List: Transatlantic History in the Long Nineteenth Century

A few months ago I posted my exam reading list for U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History.

Since then, I have (pretty much) settled my reading list for my second historical field, Transatlantic History in the Long Nineteenth Century.

I am posting that list below, both to provide an example of what a reading list for this sort of field might look like and to provoke some conversation among our readers about what such a list ought to look like.  The subtitles/subject headings in this list are heuristic -- just markers I came up with to help me put the books I'm using into very broad and basic categories.  They may not be the most apt way to describe the subject matter that I have grouped together; they are simply a kind of preliminary scaffolding.  Once I've read through this list, I will no doubt think of different and probably better ways to group these texts.

In the meantime, I would be glad to hear suggestions about alternate titles I should consider.  However, I can't let this list go (very far?) over 50 titles.  I have to draw the line somewhere. 

Drawing the line was a real challenge here.  While the boundary lines between fields and disciplines always reflect the ways in which knowledge is constructed, this exam field covers -- or at least partially sketches out -- a historical subdiscipline that is itself much concerned with redrawing the boundaries of knowledge in such a way as to bring a subject, if not into being, then at least into view.  Both "the Transatlantic" and "the long nineteenth century" cross (some) conventional boundaries of historical specialization.  Holding those two terms in tension, I have worked with my supervising professor for this field to put together a list that makes sense, and that makes sense for me in terms of contributing to the overall coherence of my training as an Americanist and an intellectual and cultural historian.  Moreover, this particular list will provide part of a very solid foundation from which to begin my dissertation.

But first I have to pass these exams.  I'm looking at Fall of 2013 for that.  I'm not looking forward to it.  But when the time comes, I intend to be ready.  Until then, I am still working on settling my final reading list, American Literature from 1789 - ca. 2000.  When I get that all sorted out, I will post it here as well.

So, anyhow, here's my reading list.


Transatlantic History in the Long Nineteenth Century


theorizing/mapping the Transatlantic

Lucien Febvre, et. al., Le Nouveau Monde et l'Europe (Conference proceedings - Rencontres internationales de Geneve) (1954)
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)
Thomas Bender, editor, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002)
Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (2002)
Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (2005)
Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (2006)
Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman, The Atlantic in Global History: 1500-2000 (2006)
Francois Furstenberg, "The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History," The American Historical Review, Vol. 113, No. 3 (June 2008)
Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (2008)
Tom Fulford and Kevin Hutchings, eds., Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750-1850: The Indian Atlantic (2009)
Peter J. Kastor and Francois Weil, eds., Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase (2009)

Forum: Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World (American Historical Review, June 2007)

Epstein, James. "Politics of Colonial Sensation: The Trial of Thomas Picton and the Cause of Louisa Calderon." The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 712-41.
Blaufarb, Rafe. "The Western Question: The Geopolitics of Latin American Independence." The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 742-63.
Gould, Eliga H. "Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery." The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 764-86.
Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. "Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?" The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 787-99.

slavery and abolition

Thomas Bender, ed., The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (1992)
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2001)
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: The Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006)
Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (2007)
Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009)
Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery
(2010)

Transatlantic religious/reform movements

Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (1999)
David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (2005)
Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (2010)

rise of nation-states

Ian Tyrrell, "Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire,"     Journal of American History 86 (3), 1999.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2006)
Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-century Britain and the United States (2006)
Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalism and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (2000)

commerce, commodities and cosmopolitanism

Mira Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (1970)
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984)
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1987)
T.H. Breen, "'Baubles of Britain':  The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present 19 (May 1988)
Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (2003)
Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity (2007)
Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (2008)

America's emergence as a Transatlantic imperial power

Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (1995)
Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (2000)
Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (2000)
David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (2004)

Transatlantic cultural / intellectual currents

R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760 - 1800 (1964)
Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (1977)
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986)
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989)
Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914 (1992)
Gillis Harp, Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920 (1995)
Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998)
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998)
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)
Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (2007)
David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2008)

Against Irony

"irony, language device, either in spoken or written form in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the literal meanings of the words or in a situation in which there is an incongruity between what is expected and what occurs" (Encyclopedia Britannica)

As historians, most of us probably take pleasure in highlighting ironies of the past. On occasion I point out ironies (perhaps as a way of showing how clever I am). For example, in the first chapter of my manuscript-in-progress on the culture wars, I write: “Many radical feminists learned how to think about personal politics as members of various New Left organizations, especially SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This was ironic, of course, since politicizing the personal, taken to its logical conclusion, led many women to believe that the New Left organizations to which they belonged were chauvinistic. Stokely Carmichael’s notoriously misogynistic claim that ‘the position of women in SNCC is prone’ symbolized the need for women to prioritize their own liberation.”

But should irony be an epistemological or political commitment? Several of my fellow USIH bloggers seen to think so. In his excellent book, Freedom to Offend, Ray Haberski positions himself between the two poles of the debates over sex in art: between the censors on the one hand, and the first amendment absolutists on the other. Ray claims such a position is where irony lives. Similarly, L.D. Burnett has written the following at this blog: “Irony. Humility. Detachment. This is what history has to offer.”

In his comments on James Livingston’s recent post about the historian’s obligations, Dan Wickberg concludes with what I take to be a call for epistemological irony (even though he doesn’t use the word): “All we’ve got are the tools we’ve got; critique is a modernist, historicist form. This seems hardly a reason for despair—it just means that the chastened and humble form of modernism is a better one for living than the totalizing and assertive form of endless revolution and dynamic progress. Maybe we need a new Stoicism—stop thinking you’re stuck, and you’re not. But don’t jump off a moving train—the results can’t be pretty.”

Epistemological wariness of “totalizing” forms of thought is one of the calling cards of  the ironic detachment so central to postmodernism. Of course, ironic detachment was also one of the signal sensibilities of Cold War liberalism, a liberal variant obsessed with consensus, pluralism, technical expertise, detachment, and irony, a zeitgeist that found its apotheosis in Daniel Bell’s 1960 book, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. According to the so-called pluralist thinkers who dominated American social thought during the 1950s, the era of encrusted ideologies, whether expressed from the left or from the right, had been rendered outmoded by the age of affluence. Government by scientific experimentation was the new order. President John F. Kennedy certified this technocratic ethos in a 1962 speech in which he declared that the nation’s problems were merely “technical and administrative” and, as such, “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.”

The pluralist thinkers were wrong about a lot. The greatest movement in their midst—the civil rights movement—was inspired by an epistemological orientation more attuned to what educational philosopher Theodore Brameld termed an “audacious and cosmic vision.” More damning to the pluralist thinkers, their ironic detachment from the anticolonial movements of the world often served as cover for U.S. aggression. Furthermore, they were not detached in the Cold War. They were more often decidedly in favor of aggressive American policies against the Soviet Union and its sphere, as if the encrusted ideologies operant in Russia were justification for American foreign policies based on equally encrusted ideologies. Ironic indeed.

In his provocative piece in the current edition of The Baffler, Steve Almond criticizes Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for what amounts to their ironic detachment from the horrors of our society. He writes:

“Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.”

Stewart’s shtick, like all among the ironically detached, is to portray himself above the fray. Almond illustrates this by way of a conversation he had with his guest in 2010, Rachel Maddow:

“…during [the interview] Stewart trotted out one of his favorite canards, that ‘both sides have their way of shutting down debate.’ Maddow asked, ‘What’s the lefty way of shutting down debate?’ ‘You’ve said Bush is a war criminal,’ Stewart replied. ‘Now that may be technically true. In my world, a war criminal is Pol Pot or the Nuremberg trials. . . . But I think that’s such an incendiary charge that when you put it into conversation as, well, technically he is, that may be right, but it feels like a conversation stopper, not a conversation starter.’ This is the Stewart credo distilled: civility at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity.”

Is this the same thing as saying ironic detachment at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity? I guess what I’m asking for is a defense of irony from those committed to irony. I’m honestly curious. (By the way, is it ironic to be committed to irony?)

What the Hell

A few weeks ago, this blog published Jim Livingston's savage critique of Paul Murphy's new book.  The critique was part of a roundtable organized by Tim Lacy, our outgoing book review editor.  I am our current book review editor.  When I read Livingston's piece, I thought, What the hell have I gotten myself into?

I wasn't just wondering about the book review editing gig, or doubting the wisdom of the blogging gig (from which I was taking a working break).  What I really had in mind was the entire field and practice of U.S. intellectual history. 

That review scared me to death.  It was a hit job; I mean, it was a frickin' crime scene.  I was stunned, shocked into silence -- sure that I had witnessed something awful and wrong, but afraid to say a thing about it publicly.  I did write Jim Livingston privately about it, but I didn't say a thing on this blog. 

Nobody did.  The whole day that review just sat there, drawing traffic like crazy, and generating who knows what back-channel conversations -- but eliciting not a single remark from any of us, all day long.  Then at three in the morning on the day after the essay went up, a blog commenter I hadn't seen in this space before remarked (in a way) on our collective spectatorial silence, but said nothing about the spectacle itself:  a senior historian practically eviscerating a junior scholar.

Finally, the day after the review went up, Dan Wickberg took Livingston on.  I saw Wickberg's name in the sidebar, and I thought, "Thank God; we're off the hook.  The Cavalry has arrived."  If anybody exemplifies both intellectual rigor and professional comity, it is Dan Wickberg. If anybody were to speak with unquestionable authority and unwavering collegiality, I knew that Dan would be the one to do it.

Then I came to the closing lines of his comment:

"Instead of farting in the museum, give us a careful and considered argument. We're all adults here; I think we can handle it."

I could not believe my eyes.  Farting in the museum?  Dan Wickberg wrote this?

What the hell!


But of course, when I re-read the whole comment, it made perfect sense, and I could see exactly what Wickberg was trying to do.  He was basically asserting that Livingston's critique amounted to a bit of adolescent behavior meant to shock the priggish, stuffy, dusty old traditional profession of intellectual history.  By starting his comment with an offhanded "oh, hell," and ending it with a nonchalant reference to "farting in the museum" (something, alas, I will never be able to un-read), Wickberg was attempting to demonstrate that if Livingston's "screed" is falling on deaf ears, it's not because historians are scandalized by his potty-mouthed language.  It's because he's not making a convincing argument.

But if you don't bring a knife to a gun fight, I guess you don't bring a fart to a shit-slinging contest.  Livingston's reply to Wickberg's charge of "farting in the museum" was an affectionate and admiring "fuck you."

"What the hell," I thought.  "He did NOT just say that."

It's not that I was scandalized or even surprised by Livingston's reply.  (It's not that I wasn't ever so slightly amused by it, either.)  Instead, I was disappointed. I wanted to hear the argument that Dan had invited him to make.

So I wrote Jim and told him that he blew it; he missed an opportunity to make his case to someone who represents the profession in a way that is open to critique and willing to take Livingston's ideas seriously. 

"You have to admit," I wrote, "he rolled out the red carpet for you to deliver a damning indictment of the whole discipline.  A scathing Jeremiad.  But you have too much of the Prophet Ezekiel about you today.  But whenever you're ready to write a guest post, let me know."

I am very pleased to say that Jim Livingston took me up on my offer.  He has written a thoughtful essay that is predictably provocative, but perhaps profitably so as well. 

It's not a scathing jeremiad, nor is it the cryptic musing of a prophet too easily mistaken for a madman.  In this essay, which will be published here on the blog on Thursday, Livingston revisits and to a certain extent revises his earlier critique of Paul Murphy's book.  He does so as part of an insightful meditation on the practice and purpose of doing history.  Indeed, to call this piece a "historiographic essay" doesn't quite do it justice.  Such a description gets at the genre but not the gist, the type but not the tone.  Livingston's essay is historiographical, and then some -- it is an inescapably elegiac homage to the historical profession, a profession that must not be content with writing elegies.

The Sensibility of Historians

By L.D. Burnett

What gives Andrew Hartman the authority to eschew (some of) the methodological commitments of Richard Hofstadter or Daniel Wickberg?  The same thing that gives Daniel Wickberg the authority to eschew (some of) the methodological commitments of Thomas Haskell and Michel Foucault.  As historians, they evidently share a certain sensibility, a certain sense of responsibility, to themselves and to their profession.   As I hope to show in this post, this particular sensibility of historians is what makes our work difficult, and what makes it matter. 

In the comment thread on Andrew Hartman's recent post about Kevin Mattson's oeuvre, Bill Fine challenged Andrew Hartman to a friendly fracas regarding matters of style and substance in historiography.  Their discussion explicitly addressed and implicitly raised a number of questions.  Is "style versus substance" a heuristically useful or a deceptively divisive binary?  Is style insubstantial? Do substantial differences come down to matters of style?  Or, to paraphrase the kid from Stand By Me, "What the hell is style, anyway?"

It seems that for the purposes of this post Hartman is picking up the term straight from Mattson's Rebels All!.  Hartman doesn't define how Mattson uses "style," but he dismisses the significance of Mattson's conclusions about it. Hartman writes:

I find Mattson’s argument that conservatives are the legatees of sixties radicalism very problematic. Conservatives are rowdy anti-establishmentarians in style. So what? In the first place, sixties radicals were hardly the first Americans to evince such a style. But more importantly, style should not always be conflated with substance, especially in this case. Sixties radicals were anti-establishment because they were against the war, racism, and sexism they thought endemic to the establishment. Obviously, the same cannot be said about conservatism.

Fine takes issue with the sharp distinction between style and substance that Hartman wants to draw "especially in this case," and instead offers "a richer, if less precise meaning" for the term.  Fine references Hofstadter's study of the "paranoid style," and invokes Dan Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter (and others) as making a "contribution to the history of sensibilities."[1] 

Situating the work of Hofstadter as a contribution to a larger -- and better, in the sense of being more comprehensive -- inquiry that takes "sensibilities" as its object of study is just one of the more daring rhetorical moves Wickberg makes in his essay, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New." As part of making his case for the "superior" scope of "sensibility as an object of study,"[2] Wickberg encompasses Hofstadter's historical understanding within his own.  That's one way to claim your place in the profession.

Hartman doesn't challenge Fine's reading of Wickberg, or Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter.  However, he does re-situate Wickberg in relation to Hofstadter.  Hartman places Wickberg alongside "James, Dewey, Foucault, Derrida, [and] Hofstadter," only to dismiss them all as historians who have "a tendency" -- might one say a style, or perhaps a sensibility? -- "to overstate the conflation of style and substance."  That's another way to claim your place in the profession.

So, to review:  Hartman challenges Mattson's conclusions on the grounds that giving undue weight to "style" is a methodological mistake.  Fine challenges Hartman's binaristic division of style and substance, invoking Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter.  Hartman groups Wickberg and Hofstadter together with Derrida and Foucault, which at first glance seems like high praise for Wickberg.  However, lumping historians together with theorists -- especially these theorists -- and suggesting that they think alike is not exactly a compliment.  Indeed, as I noted above, the fact that Thomas Haskell purports to explore the history of sensibilities but does so through a "rather abstract and speculative argument"  -- that he views his object theoretically, rather than historically -- is precisely what draws Wickberg's criticism.[3]

Wickberg and Haskell take a similar approach, though, when it comes to Foucault.  However, Wickberg seems more willing to acknowledge the usefulness of Foucault's theories than Haskell, who accuses Foucault (and Stanley Fish) of playfully or perversely choosing to operate under particular methodological and epistemic assumptions that "constitute a blank check for tendentiousness."[4]  Wickberg is more moderate in his critique of the French theorist, as one might expect from a historian whose recent challenge to the purported consensus regarding the state of the field of intellectual history included the suggestion that we "listen to Foucault instead" of assuming that contexts (and therefore the questions that come with them) are not in many ways fashioned by our very inquiry.[5] 

Nevertheless, Wickberg claims, Foucault's usefulness is limited, because Foucault's vision is limiting.  Wickberg bases this claim on the same pragmatic ground that Haskell occupies:  what does Foucault get us?  Here is Wickberg's answer: 

The overwhelming focus on instrumentalizing culture as a tool of power in some of the dominant forms of cultural history finds no room for those elements of culture that cannot be implicated in power relations.  Culture is not power, nor is power the only or the most important element of culture.  Power is but one dimension of culture, a dimension that might be more or less important for the historian and analyst, depending upon the concrete specifics of the cultural moment being studied.  It is an impoverished vision of human life that insists on turning people's whole ways of experiencing, perceiving, and feeling into expressions of one dimension of human life.[6]

What I find most striking here is not the fact that a cultural and intellectual historian who has taken the linguistic turn dares to challenge the hegemony of Foucault (though I have to admit that I somehow missed this enchanted doorway to the Land Beyond Power/Knowledge in earlier readings of this essay).  Instead, what is so singular -- and at the same time so typical, so exemplary -- about this assessment of Foucauldian historiography is the way Wickberg grounds his critique in the autonomy of historical understanding.

The "autonomy of historical understanding" can refer to (at least!) two things.  On the one hand, it refers to historical epistemology as distinct from and free from the constraining necessity of (social) scientific reasoning -- historical inquiry as ideographic rather than nomothetic.[7]  In this sense, Wickberg can set aside an exclusively Foucauldian approach because it subsumes and effaces the particularities of the past beneath a homogenizing general theory about power.  For the same reason, Wickberg can sharply criticize Haskell's treatment of "sensibilities" for its abstraction; rather than focusing on concrete historical manifestations of a particular humanitarian sensibility, Haskell discusses "the humanitarian sensibility" via theoretical, hypothetical speculations. 

But the autonomy of historical understanding means more than just the epistemological distinctiveness of historical inquiry; it can also refer to the competence of the professional historian's intellectual and moral judgment as such an inquirer.  The historian must exercise autonomy; he or she must be able to adjudicate between competing visions and versions of the past.  This autonomy is not the automatic possession of the historian; it is the hard-won habitus of seasoned practitioners who, by their participation in the profession, agree to work within a set of basic norms and constraints that Haskell identifies elsewhere as characteristic of a pragmatic objectivity.  Among other things, professional historians are committed

to do such things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, discard pleasing interpretations that cannot pass elementary tests of evidence and logic, and, most important of all, suspend or bracket [their] own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers.[8]

Historians' demonstrable commitment to this pragmatic objectivity -- verifiable because it is testable, contestable and gamely contested by their fellow practitioners, as Fine and Hartman so congenially demonstrate -- is what gives someone like Dan Wickberg the professional authority to say things like, "Foucault is of limited use here." Further, he does so not only on epistemic but also on moral grounds -- and those grounds are situated within his own understanding as a historian, and within his own understanding of history as a humanistic discipline, an understanding that, if not acquired in the contest, was doubtless sharpened by it.  Wickberg's rejection of a narrow Foucauldian vision is not based on an appeal to extra-professional norms and standards, but rather grows out of a professional commitment to a particular way of understanding the past, a way that would be morally indefensible if it were not methodologically sound -- at least methodologically sound enough to be put to the test in the pages of the AHR.  In a similar way, Hartman's take on the (in)sufficiency of the history of sensibilities as a methodological approach has already come under an (informal) kind of peer review, and will be subjected to the collective critical scrutiny of the professional community.

Ultimately, the legitimacy of Wickberg's challenge to Foucauldian theory, as well as the legitimacy of Hartman's challenge to Wickberg, or Fine's challenge to Hartman, derive from these historians' autonomy as members in good standing of what Haskell calls the community of competent inquirers, a community whose epistemic integrity as a whole depends on the adjudicative integrity -- the intellectual morality -- of its individual members.[9]  

The challenge Fine has issued to Hartman regarding the finer points at the heart of 1960s historiography calls into question not only Hartman's methodology, but also his moral vision.  Understood in terms of Wickberg's contrarian state-of-the-field essay, Fine is asking Hartman to account for the questions he asks, and the way he frames problems, precisely because this is a way that precludes other approaches.  Fine wants Hartman to explain what he gains, and also to acknowledge what he loses, by eschewing approaches that do not assume sharp distinctions between "style and substance."

Just as Fine demonstrates his autonomy by asking the question, so also Hartman asserts his autonomy in giving his answer.  His response to Fine demonstrates the freedom of historians to choose when to follow established models and when to set them aside.  While a U.S. intellectual historian might be expected to be familiar with "James, Dewey, Foucault, Derrida, Hofstadter, Wickberg, etc.," he or she is under no obligation to see matters just as these scholars have viewed them individually or collectively.  (Is there anything, I wonder, that they have all viewed in like manner?)  Indeed, the historian's obligation is to exercise his or her own best judgment as a critical, competitive member of the "community of the competent."[10]

Nevertheless, I find Hartman's response to Fine somewhat unsatisfying, precisely because it does not draw upon the full authority of Hartman's moral autonomy as a historian.  Hartman has explained that he doesn't like the way the history of sensibilities seems to flatten the very distinctions he would prefer to draw in sharp relief.  But what he does not explain is why it is important to him -- methodologically, epistemologically, ethically -- to draw that sharp distinction. 

Why is it essential for Hartman to draw a sharp distinction between the New Left and the post-60s conservative movement?  I am not suggesting that such sharp distinctions don't exist, nor accepting that they do.  What I want to know is this:  what does that distinction get Hartman, and what does it get us?  In other words, I would like to know the practical consequences of choosing to see post 1960s conservatism as sharply distinct from all the varieties of conservatism that came before.   

Again, I'm not questioning the accuracy or the adequacy of that understanding; Andrew is the expert here.  I just want to know how that understanding fits within Hartman's vision of the 60s and the Culture Wars (and I may have to wait for the book on that), and how that understanding in turn fits in with his more general "vision of human life." 

Of course, by asserting that a historiographical method does in fact express a particular and ethically valent vision of human life, I am identifying myself with the sensibilities of similarly minded historians.  However, that is not the same thing as identifying myself as a historian of sensibilities.  That methodological approach is certainly well-represented in my reading list and in my graduate program, and it may or may not be well-represented in this blog post.  But the extent to which I will adopt it or not is a matter of my own autonomous judgment as a historian. 

This is my ethical obligation to my fellow-practitioners: to choose the methodological approach which I believe will allow me to give the best possible account of my subject, while at the same time accounting as best I can for the methods I use to attain that goal.  That professional ethos characterizes the sensibility of historians,  a sensibility I am pleased and proud to share with Andrew Hartman, Bill Fine, Dan Wickberg, and all the other fractious combatants in this fracas of the competent.


______________

[1]Daniel Wickberg, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New," The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 3 (June 2007), 677.

[2]Wickberg 664.

[3]Wickberg 680.

[4]Thomas Haskell, "Justifying Academic Freedom in the Era of Power/Knowledge," in Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 212.

[5]Daniel Wickberg, "The Present and Future of American Intellectual History," U.S. Intellectual History: The Blog for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH), 3 April 2012. http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/04/present-and-future-of-american.html Accessed 15 June 2012, 7:45 a.m.

[6]Wickberg, "Sensibilities," 674 (italics mine).

[7]The most systematic explication of this distinction that I have read to date is Louis Mink's essay on the subject.  A perceived need to define and defend the distinctive epistemic and disciplinary autonomy of history, especially intellectual history, emerges quite clearly in many of the essays presented at the Wingspread conference and subsequently published by Higham and Conkin.  See Louis O. Mink, "The Autonomy of Historical Understanding," History and Theory 5, no. 1 (1966): 24-47; John Higham and Paul Conkin, editors, New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979), especially the essays by Hollinger, Wood, Ross, May and Haskell.

[8] Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory, Vol. 29 No. 2 (May, 1990), 132.

[9]Haskell, "Academic Freedom," 176. 

[10] Haskell, "Academic Freedom," 178.

The Company We Keep

Before I was a regular blogger here -- before I had even left my first faltering comment as the far-more-mysterious-than-I-intended-to-be "LD" -- I started a personal blog about the process of becoming a historian.  My blogospheric venture was hardly unique.  Lots of PhD students blog -- it can be a way of finding your footing, getting your bearings, training your voice.  That's how it worked for me, anyhow.

The very first post I wrote on that blog was a meditation on the uncanny experience of reading the scholarship of a now-deceased historian named, delightfully, Rising Lake Morrow.  I considered how it is possible that I as a reader can be "in conversation" with this author.

I wrote:

The term "conversation," though, implies some degree of mutuality and perhaps intentionality.  So is it fair to apply it to my reading of Morrow?  After all, I can choose Morrow as a partner in dialogue; he cannot choose me.  Eighty years after his article was published, I doubt that he is around to make any more choices -- just as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison were unavailable for comment when Morrow drew upon their writings for his article of 1936.

But even when those men were writing for the exigencies of the present, they knew they were writing for the future too.  And when Morrow published his article about their thinking, he was writing not only for his contemporaries but also for the generations of scholars who he expected to succeed him, as scholars do.  In a way, then, Morrow did choose to converse with me.  As the writer to the Hebrews put it, "By faith he, though dead, yet speaketh."

This is the faith of scholarship:  believing that our work might speak not only to the questions of the moment but also to those questioners whose time is yet to come.  And upon this faith is built the secular ekklesia of the academy -- not the communion of saints, but the communion of sages.  We converse with each other, and with scholars of generations past, for the benefit not only of ourselves but for all the scholars who will follow us. We respond to living texts and dead authors, not to pass the time or fill the world with words, but to say something worth our own and others' time right now that might still have value later.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about the value of history, the value of being -- or becoming -- a historian.

As I mentioned in a comment on Andrew's post of earlier this week, I have spent the past several days working through the historiography/theory section of my exam list for U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History. 

Yes, I'm overly concerned that I must master this material well enough to give a good account of myself during my written and oral qualifying exams.  Yes, I'm unreasonably annoyed with myself for not having acquired such mastery yet.  How can I be so patient with my students, yet so impatient with myself? (Don't answer that! It's a rhetorical question, not an invitation for armchair analysis.)   Yet despite my angst about my (in)sufficient command of these texts after a whole week of reading (!), despite the impostor syndrome that flares up every time I come across an untranslated German phrase ("How can I be a Real Historian unless I read German?!") -- despite all that, beneath all that, runs a deep, broad current of contentment.

As I read these historians, as I try to understand the sense they have made of the work and worth and wisdom of history, I am filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude.  I am thankful for them, for their life's work, thankful that they have written what I am reading.  Whatever ideas or insights or arguments I take from their pages, I am at the last simply grateful for their company. 

So far I have read Lovejoy, Collingwood, Mink, Fritz Stern's marvelous anthology of historical writing from Voltaire to C. Vann Woodward, the proceedings of the Wingspread Conference, Joan Scott, and Hayden White.  Right now I'm making my way (again) through Peter Novick's That Noble Dream, and enjoying every word of it.

I know, I know. I'm not expected to read every word of every text on my list -- this is what my profs tell me, this is what my colleagues who have already passed their exams tell me.  Practically speaking, I just need to read enough to sound like I know what I'm talking about.  There are some texts I will need to read more closely than others; there are some texts I would do well to skim. 

But when it comes to this section of my list, I must confess to intransigent impracticality.  I will do no skimming here; I don't want to miss a word. For me, reading what historians have had to say about what it means to think about history or write history, what it means to be a historian, is an absolute delight.  And if I cannot take delight in my work -- well, then why the hell bother? 

Now and then as I have made my way through this reading, I have tweeted a snippet of a sentence or a part of a phrase that struck me as wise or funny or challenging.  But it is rare indeed to come across a historical aphorism of 140 characters or less.  It takes Hayden White twice that long to get to his first comma.  So I have been able to quote only sparingly from texts that are anything but spare.  Rich, bracing, brilliant, daunting, deep -- that's what this reading has been so far. 

Allow me, reader, to share some of these delights with you, before returning to the question of the value of studying history.

From Lovejoy:

"It is the beliefs which are so much a matter of course that they are rather tacitly presupposed than formally expressed and argued for, the ways of thinking which seem so natural and inevitable that they are not scrutinized with the eye of logical self-consciousness, that often are most decisive of the character of a philosopher's doctrine." (7)

"The adequate record of even the confusions of our forebears, may help, not only to clarify those confusions, but to engender a salutary doubt whether we are wholly immune from different but equally great confusions." (23)

From Collingwood:

"The historian's business is to know the past, not to know the future, and whenever historians claim to be able to determine the future in advance of its happening, we may know with certainty that something has gone wrong with their fundamental conception of history." (49)

"Passion and ignorance have certainly done their work, and an important work, in past history, but they have never been mere passion and mere ignorance; they have been rather a blind and blundering will for good and a dim and deluded wisdom." (104)

"History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind.  For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should 'vibrate in the historian's mind', that is to say, that the evidence for them should be here and now before him and intelligible to him.  For history is not contained in books or documents; it lives only, as a present interest and pursuit, in the mind of the historian when he criticizes and interprets those documents, and by so doing relives for himself the states of mind into which he inquires." (202)

"All history is the history of thought: and when an historian says that a man is in a certain situation this is the same as saying that he thinks he is in this situation....The historian thinks it a wrong way; but wrong ways of thinking are just as much historical facts as right ones, and, no less than they, determine the situation (always a thought-situation) in which the man who shares them is placed." (317)

From Stern:

"The historian himself cannot escape this pressure for synthesis and meaning; it is heard within the profession as well as outside....The historian cannot escape these challenges; he broods, alone or in groups, over the presuppositions of his discipline, the logic and the method of his work, the place it should occupy among other, newer pursuits." (23) 

"...the writing of history inflicts on every historian choices for which neither his method nor his material provides a ready answer.  Some answers only the historian himself can give, and this has kept history a live, changing pursuit....History springs from a live concern, deals with life, serves life.  A discipline so close to life cannot remain fixed; it changes with time, with the impact of new hopes, thoughts, and fears.  The history of historiography records the interaction between the fixed elements in history--the critical, systematic method and the sources -- and the time-bound elements embodied in the historian." (24)

"As I said at the beginning, the historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.  And while his obligation to the past, his complete, unassailable fidelity to it, must always claim his first loyalty, he must accept the fact that the choices he makes as a historian are not of consequence to him alone, but will affect the moral sense, perhaps the wisdom, of his generation.  And since he knows that his own being, his intellectual capabilities and his critical faculties as well as his deeper sense of righteousness and love, are engaged in the writing of history, he knows that his work, too, is a moral act." (32)

From Niebuhr (in Stern):

"What Pyrrhus said to his Epirots -- ye are my wings -- expresses the feelings of the zealous teacher towards his listeners, whom he loves and who take part in his lectures with all their hearts.  His own work is promoted not only by the desire to be clear, to present nothing as a truth which might admit of a doubt, but the sight of his audience and his immediate relation to it awaken a thousand thoughts while he is speaking." (53)

"When a historian is reviving former times, his interest in them and sympathy with them will be the deeper, the greater the events he has witnessed with a bleeding or a rejoicing heart." (53)

From Macaulay (in Stern):

"The effect of historical reading is analogous, in many respects, to that produced by foreign travel...But men may travel far, and return with minds as contracted as if they had never stirred from their own market-town.  In the same manner, men may know the dates of many battles and the genealogies of many royal houses, and yet be no wiser." (85)

From Michelet (in Stern):

"Teaching did me good service.  The fierce trial at colleges had altered my character...Those young people, amiable and confiding, who believed in me, reconciled me to mankind....They had done me, without knowing it, an immense service.  If I had, as an historian, any special merit to sustain me on a level with my illustrious predecessors, I should owe it to teaching, which for me was friendship.  Those great historians have been brilliant, judicious, and profound; as for me, I have loved more." (115)

"Let it be my part in the future to have not attained, but marked, the aim of history, to have called it by a name that nobody had given it.  Thierry called it narration, and M. Guizot analysis.  I have named it resurrection, and this name will remain." (117)

From Droysen (in Stern):

"History is Humanity's knowledge of itself, its certainty about itself.  It is not 'the light and the truth,' but a search therefor, a sermon thereupon, a consecration thereto.  It is like John the Baptist, 'not that Light but sent to bear witness of that Light.'" (144)

From Trevelyan (in Stern):

"What is easy to read has been difficult to write.  The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say.  A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow." (240)

From Hayden White:

"If one is going to 'go to history,' one had better have an address in mind rather than go wandering around the streets of the past like a flaneur.  Historical flaneurisme is undeniably enjoyable, but the history we are living today is no place for tourists.  If you are going to 'go to history,' you had better have a clear idea of which history, and you had better have a pretty good notion as to whether it is hospitable to the values you carry into it." (164)

This whole blog post may be an exercise in flaneurisme.  But I hope it testifies not only to the values I carry to history, but to the value I find in it -- although, if I have understood Hayden White correctly, perhaps there is no difference.

Nevertheless, the value of history is not exhausted by the uses we can make of it.  There is value  (and perhaps not a little danger, not a little risk) in what history makes of us, how the study of history can shape us, how the company we keep as historians might help to make us more fit company for those who walk along with us, and for those who follow after.

Reading List: U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History

As I mentioned before, I am in the process of putting together my reading lists for qualifying exams.  My three fields are American Intellectual and Cultural History, American Literature, and Transatlantic History in the Long Nineteenth Century.  I am still working on my lists for the latter two fields, but my reading list for U.S. intellectual/cultural history is settled. 

I thought it might be helpful for our blog readers who may be planning a field in U.S. intellectual history to see what my exam list looks like.  So I am posting it below.  First, though, I wanted to make a few prefatory remarks on the logic of the list.


My exam list is pragmatic, not canonical.  The 100 volumes on this list are not meant to represent, encompass, or constitute "the canon" of U.S. intellectual history.  This is not meant to be a comprehensive list. It does not represent all that one should read in the field; it does not represent all that I should read in the field.  It is a practical list whose purpose is to adequately prepare me to "think in the field" and have some overall sense of its contours.

Some books are on the list because they are established, classic works of scholarship that have been influential in defining questions in the field.  Others are included because they represent current trends in scholarship, and still others because they address the need for "coverage" of a particular body of thought.

By the same token, some texts that might customarily appear on a U.S. intellectual history list do not appear here because they will be on an exam list for one of my other fields.  So, for example, I will read Thoreau's Walden for my American Literature exam; Kloppenberg's Uncertain Victory will be on my Transatlantic History list.

Thus, while this list is designed to provide me with a broad, basic foundation for teaching and scholarship in U.S. intellectual history, it is constructed in dialog with my other fields.  Furthermore, this list is also inflected to address my specific research interests; I am preparing for my qualifying exams with my future dissertation firmly in mind.  For that reason, I'm heartily glad that I decided to change my dissertation topic before I started putting together my exam lists.  (What's my new dissertation topic?  A really good one.  Seriously.  But that's a post for another day.)

For heuristic purposes, I have divided the list below into three sections:  primary sources, secondary sources, and historiography/theory.  The primary sources are listed in the order of their publication.  The secondary sources are divided into a broad scheme of periodization.  Within these divisions, I've listed the works in (rough) historical order.  So, for example, within their section Amy Dru Stanley's From Bondage to Contract is listed before Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace.  The official version of this list -- the one I will hand in to my school with all the requisite signatures on all the requisite forms from my committee -- will be divided simply into primary and secondary sources.  Within those divisions, texts will be listed in alphabetical order by author's last name, with full bibliographic information.

So, without further ado, here's my reading list for my qualifying exam in U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History.


PRIMARY SOURCES

Reference sources for American thought:

The Bible
The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited and with an introduction by Isaac Kramnick (1995)

Survey:

David Hollinger and Charles Capper, editors, The American Intellectual Tradition, Volume I: 1630-1865, sixth edition (2011)
______, The American Intellectual Tradition, Volume II: 1865 to the Present, sixth edition (2011).                                       
                                                   
Individual Authors / Texts:

Jonathan Edwards, Treatise on the Religious Affections (1746)
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1784-88)
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (1788)
Benjamin Rush, Essays: Literary, Moral, and Philosophical (1798)
Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture, and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto (1847)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (1836 - 1844)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
William James, Writings: 1878-1899
    Psychology, briefer course; The Will to Believe; Talks to Teachers and Students (Library of     America anthology)
William James, Writings: 1902-1910
    The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays (Library of America anthology)
W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)
Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (1918)
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927)
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934)
Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (1936)
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (1949)
Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)
William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale (1951)
Students for a Democratic Society, "The Port Huron Statement" (1962)
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987)
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987)
Linda Nicholson, editor, The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (1997)   
           
SECONDARY SOURCES

Colonial era to Constitution (more or less)

Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939)
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956)
Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (1976)
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1998)
Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (2011)
Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (1972)

Early Republic to Civil War (more or less)

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975, 1999)
Linda Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays (1997)
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (2005)
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)
John L. Thomas, "Romantic Reform in America, 1815-1865," American Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1965), pp. 656-681.
Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (1994)
Daniel Walker Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs (1984)
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1995)
Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876 (1982)

Reconstruction to Interwar Years (more or less)

Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (1998)
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1966)
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2002)
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (2001)
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (1992)
Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880 - 1920 (1994)
Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (2010)
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (2007)
James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940     (1994)
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955)
Francesca Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science and the Geography of Knowledge (2008)
Daniel Borus, Twentieth-Century Multiplicity (2012)
Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (1983)
Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University (1996)
Brian M. Ingrassia, The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (2012)
Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (1990)
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1954)
Morton Gabriel White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (1949)

Interwar years (more or less) to 1990s

Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the     Depression Years (2004)
Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (2008)
Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (2003)
Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and     1950s (1989)
Jason Stevens, God Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War (2010)
George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (2nd. Ed. 2006)
George Cotkin, Existential America (2005)
Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture and Politics in Cold War America (2010)
Richard King, Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940 - 1970 (2004)
Nikhil Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (2005)
Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (2011)
James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (2009)
Mary Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents:  A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (2000)
James Kloppenberg, Reading Obama (2011)   

Longer-term studies / collections

John Higham, Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture (2001)
Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (2004)
Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 (2009)
Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 (2001)
George Fredrickson, The Black image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1987)
Wilfred McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994)
Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (2001)
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2011)
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991)
James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (1986)
                                                   
HISTORIOGRAPHY/THEORY/PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Arthur O. Lovejoy, Chapter 1, "Introduction: The Study of the History of  Ideas," The Great Chain of Being (1936)
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946)
Louis O. Mink, “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding,” History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1966),     pp. 24-47
Fritz Stern, editor, The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (1973)
John Higham and Paul Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (1980)
Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053-1075.
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987)
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (1988)
Thomas Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (2000)
Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (2007)
Daniel Wickberg, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New," The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 3 (June 2007), pp. 661-684
Kerwin Lee Klein, From History to Theory (2011)