Susan Pearson's Book Wins Merle Curti Award

The blogging staff of the USIH blog and the members of the S-USIH would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Susan J. Pearson, whose outstanding book The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (U. of Chicago, 2011) won the 2012 Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History.

The publisher's website offers a brief summary of this brilliantly-conceived text, and includes a few of the many well-deserved accolades the book garnered from early reviewers.  Here, for example, is Dan Wickberg's early assessment of  Pearson's important work:

The Rights of the Defenseless is much more than an examination of the development of specific policies by humane societies, more than a case study of the emergence of Progressive era reform as it applied to the protection of children and animals.  Rather, Susan Pearson uses the very specific concern with these two forms of dependency to explore the definition of rights in liberal discourse; the boundary between person and animal in modern thought and practice; the symbolic configuration of self and society in nineteenth-century political culture; the emergence of a modern mode of linking feeling to reason to action. I do not think it is too much to say that this book will redefine the understanding of the humanitarian sensibility and its place in modern American culture. This is history as an act of the moral imagination in the very best sense.

Pearson's history is pathbreaking indeed, and we are all pleased that the 2012 Merle Curti Award Committee recognized her truly outstanding achievement. 

Susan was not able to accept this honor in person at the 2012 OAH meeting in Milwaukee. She was busy with another outstanding achievement:  she was having a baby.  So double congratulations to Susan and her lovely family, including especially her husband, Michael Kramer, a frequent, smart, savvy commenter on this blog.  I believe they have set the bar for the Best Week Ever for intellectual historians.

X-post: Michael Kramer Forwards "Five Hypotheses for Digital History"

Here's the original post, put up for Michael Kramer's course at Northwestern University titled "Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival." Below are his five hypotheses.

-------------------------------------------------------------
This is an initial attempt, quickly written and subject to revision, at five hypotheses for digital history:

1) Digital history will ultimately be about far more than just the application of computational power to archival materials. While materials will be increasingly treated as data, analyzable on unimaginable scales quantitatively, this will not be enough to constitute a rewarding historical subfield. Qualitative analysis of an original and convincing sort will be needed to link digitally-produced findings to existing historiographic debates and discussions and offer new insights.

2) The move to the screen and future modes of receiving history will demand far greater attention to design, display, narrative, and storytelling than existing historical writing. This is both exciting and daunting. It asks historians to continue to imagine themselves as writers, but also to think of themselves as curators. It demands far more cooperative work on presentation of history. It will require us to push past formulaic article and monograph writing and think much more carefully about the range of narrative possibilities for relating interpretations of the past to others. The way history “looks” will change dramatically.

3) Digital interactivity poses new possibilities and demands for historians. The relationship between interactivity and interpretation, which many historians think about considerably in the classroom, now has a role to play in the scholarly presentation of findings online. Indeed, findings themselves may need to be far more contingent, and even may be produced through the design of interactive tools that allow visitors to manipulate materials. Existing definitions of the authorship of history itself come into question here as historians increasingly have the capacity to create not final texts, but rather environments for collective historical inquiry of materials and fellow (whether compatible or competing) interpretations.

4) As with the digital generally, digital history raises issues of copyright and intellectual property. Not just in terms of the question of authorship mentioned in hypothesis number three, but also in terms of the use of materials in the public realm for historical inquiry. How will we publish, share, and allow others to interact with materials without fundamentally altering existing copyright practices? What do we owe copyright holders as historians and what do copyright holders owe the public when it comes to historical inquiry?

5) Digital history is at once a continuation of long-running historical traditions and a break with certain practices and assumptions. As historians, we have the opportunity to consider digital history through our classic dual lens of change *and* continuity. The field is not a fundamental break with past modes and technologies of history-making, but it is something new, worth exploring even if it bangs up at times against professional and institutional constraints.

X-post: Michael Kramer Forwards "Five Hypotheses for Digital History"

Here's the original post, put up for Michael Kramer's course at Northwestern University titled "Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival." Below are his five hypotheses.

-------------------------------------------------------------
This is an initial attempt, quickly written and subject to revision, at five hypotheses for digital history:

1) Digital history will ultimately be about far more than just the application of computational power to archival materials. While materials will be increasingly treated as data, analyzable on unimaginable scales quantitatively, this will not be enough to constitute a rewarding historical subfield. Qualitative analysis of an original and convincing sort will be needed to link digitally-produced findings to existing historiographic debates and discussions and offer new insights.

2) The move to the screen and future modes of receiving history will demand far greater attention to design, display, narrative, and storytelling than existing historical writing. This is both exciting and daunting. It asks historians to continue to imagine themselves as writers, but also to think of themselves as curators. It demands far more cooperative work on presentation of history. It will require us to push past formulaic article and monograph writing and think much more carefully about the range of narrative possibilities for relating interpretations of the past to others. The way history “looks” will change dramatically.

3) Digital interactivity poses new possibilities and demands for historians. The relationship between interactivity and interpretation, which many historians think about considerably in the classroom, now has a role to play in the scholarly presentation of findings online. Indeed, findings themselves may need to be far more contingent, and even may be produced through the design of interactive tools that allow visitors to manipulate materials. Existing definitions of the authorship of history itself come into question here as historians increasingly have the capacity to create not final texts, but rather environments for collective historical inquiry of materials and fellow (whether compatible or competing) interpretations.

4) As with the digital generally, digital history raises issues of copyright and intellectual property. Not just in terms of the question of authorship mentioned in hypothesis number three, but also in terms of the use of materials in the public realm for historical inquiry. How will we publish, share, and allow others to interact with materials without fundamentally altering existing copyright practices? What do we owe copyright holders as historians and what do copyright holders owe the public when it comes to historical inquiry?

5) Digital history is at once a continuation of long-running historical traditions and a break with certain practices and assumptions. As historians, we have the opportunity to consider digital history through our classic dual lens of change *and* continuity. The field is not a fundamental break with past modes and technologies of history-making, but it is something new, worth exploring even if it bangs up at times against professional and institutional constraints.

X-post: Michael Kramer Reflects On The Third Annual USIH Conference

[First posted at Michael Kramer's weblog, Culture Rover, on Oct. 28, 2010, this essay reflects on the overall meaning of the Third Annual USIH Conference. Michael attended and presented a paper, and has subsequently contributed to the thread below on the event's final plenary. Michael works at Northwestern University.]
----------------------------------------------

Instituting Intellectual History: the ins and outs of academic intellectual history.


[Christopher Lasch]

No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams

----------------------------------------------

At the closing panel of the third annual U.S. Intellectual History conference, whose theme was “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” the ghost of Christopher Lasch very much haunted the halls. A number of former graduate students, and even Lasch’s own daughter, delivered eloquent, forceful talks in response to the question “Intellectual History for What?” They urged colleagues and students to work not only as specialized scholars, but also as cultural and social critics.

But a question from a younger colleague in the audience revealed an underlying tension at the conference. The question was along the lines of (I paraphrase): is the historical moment for intellectual historians to serve as cultural critics and public intellectuals a la Lasch over? Or, is the “intellectual as a social type” no more?

There was a sense in which the question was almost a rhetorical one, an answer to it less crucial than its underlying point. Which was that while established scholars might hunger to reach beyond academe, speaking from the podium to urge themselves and their fellow specialists to address broader public audiences, or to dive promiscuously, as George Cotkin put it, into what David Steigerwald called “the play of ideas across time,” many younger scholars were perhaps there for more narrow reasons of professional accreditation in an academic job market that is so oversupplied that it is almost nonexistent, particularly in intellectual history. Those with security within academia longed to escape it for something less institutionalized, while those outside the gates (or within them, but marginalized) longed for institutional (and economic!) validation.

Of course, the lines between these two longings—to reach broader publics, on the one hand, and to secure positions in the historical profession, on the other—were blurry. Both established and younger scholars at the conference danced between the two. James Kloppenberg’s keynote speech, for instance, focused on the intellectual biography of Barack Obama to explain the deeper history behind the strange paradox of how the President is reviled on the right while, at the same time, met with such intense disappointment on the left.

Like many of the presentations at the conference, Kloppenberg’s talk drew upon his intellectual history “chops” to speak to contemporary political matters. For Kloppenberg, Obama’s own intellectual history provided insight into this enigmatic man. The President’s commitments to a pragmatist’s liberal vision of the United States’s democratic traditions—which turn up in Obama’s books and own education—temper his rhetoric and keep him focused on long-term social improvement while also allowing him to resist the polarizations of degraded contemporary political theater.

But despite the evidence in this marvelous keynote of the possibility that historians might move between specialized academic labor and a broader public culture, the tensions between getting out there into the world and getting in there into the academy lingered. Perhaps when it comes to the study of ideas, it’s still about the economy, stupid? Maybe. There was a sense that the tensions raised by the sharp question in the closing minutes of the conference were less about intellectual issues than institutional and economic ones. If, as the question suggested, the cultural critic of the twentieth-century is no more, if the intellectual as social type is dead, then what next for intellectual history as a public as well as a narrowly-professional concern?

George Cotkin proposed that he felt liberated to write adventurous intellectual history because of his position at a non-research university, but even those kind of academic jobs are few and far between these days, and the oversupply of able candidates for them is startling. So it is true, as Wilfred McClay pointed out, that the study of ideas remains vital both inside and outside academia even if the role of intellectual historians continues to be imperiled. But as Casey Blake essentially declared in his closing remarks, the research university may be dead for pursuing a true and only intellectual history. If civic education, teaching, and writing are still to be part of intellectual life, and intellectual historians are to participate fully in them, what institutional forms, then, should intellectual history work take? How should ideas play across time if there is no safety net below them?

Of course, there never has been a safety net, really. Both within the professional field of history and in the broad public beyond it, ideas still grow, blossom, go to seed, and bear fruit again with abundance. Blake mentioned the website The New Inquiry as an example of a new and hopeful concentration of intellectual energy, and rightly so. But is The New Inquiry an institution in the economic sense? Can it provide the sustenance necessary to sustain the intellect? What will provide the livelihood for lively intellectual engagement?

These institutional and economic questions for the life of the mind have always been fretful ones. There was no golden age for intellectuals in America, even when we look back nostalgically on the burgeoning fields of the Cold War research university or peer through the mists into the unkempt gardens of Greenwich Village or Harlem Renaissance bohemians. Nor, for that matter is today as bleak as it sometimes seems. And even though the current pressures are for the work of public intellectuals to be “relevant” and “do something,” one can be heartened by David Steigerwald’s assertion at the final session that the main reason to pursue intellectual history is not that studying ideas somehow exerts “resistance” or “oppositionality,” but rather that it is, simply put, dignified.

Dignity is something to ponder, and perhaps even something into which we can dig our roots. Dignity constitutes a kind of public act. And it can be a fertile emotion. But this dignity needs support. One task that the U.S. Intellectual History conference, once a blog, now growing into an organization, might address is the intellectual groundwork needed to foster a more expansive institutional space for the life of the mind.

Publics are atmospheric and amorphous. Intellectuals have and will continue to be resourceful in their cultivation. And those ideas, wherever they sprout, will remain hearty. The issue isn’t extinction, it’s robustness. The more we can eat, sleep, and breathe, the more we can eat, sleep, and breathe intellectual history.

So the question posed at the end of the conference really leads to two questions. First, in a world in which history still matters (see the recent uses of the past by Glenn Beck and others), what kind of new structures can make for a less shrill and more intellectual study of ideas? Second, if not the research university as it has existed for academic intellectual history, then what? Websites and social networks? Markets or state-run institutions or non-profit think-tanks or what?

Put another way, the question might be: how do we better institute intellectual history without institutionalizing it?

X-post: Michael Kramer Reflects On The Third Annual USIH Conference

[First posted at Michael Kramer's weblog, Culture Rover, on Oct. 28, 2010, this essay reflects on the overall meaning of the Third Annual USIH Conference. Michael attended and presented a paper, and has subsequently contributed to the thread below on the event's final plenary. Michael works at Northwestern University.]
----------------------------------------------

Instituting Intellectual History: the ins and outs of academic intellectual history.


[Christopher Lasch]

No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams

----------------------------------------------

At the closing panel of the third annual U.S. Intellectual History conference, whose theme was “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” the ghost of Christopher Lasch very much haunted the halls. A number of former graduate students, and even Lasch’s own daughter, delivered eloquent, forceful talks in response to the question “Intellectual History for What?” They urged colleagues and students to work not only as specialized scholars, but also as cultural and social critics.

But a question from a younger colleague in the audience revealed an underlying tension at the conference. The question was along the lines of (I paraphrase): is the historical moment for intellectual historians to serve as cultural critics and public intellectuals a la Lasch over? Or, is the “intellectual as a social type” no more?

There was a sense in which the question was almost a rhetorical one, an answer to it less crucial than its underlying point. Which was that while established scholars might hunger to reach beyond academe, speaking from the podium to urge themselves and their fellow specialists to address broader public audiences, or to dive promiscuously, as George Cotkin put it, into what David Steigerwald called “the play of ideas across time,” many younger scholars were perhaps there for more narrow reasons of professional accreditation in an academic job market that is so oversupplied that it is almost nonexistent, particularly in intellectual history. Those with security within academia longed to escape it for something less institutionalized, while those outside the gates (or within them, but marginalized) longed for institutional (and economic!) validation.

Of course, the lines between these two longings—to reach broader publics, on the one hand, and to secure positions in the historical profession, on the other—were blurry. Both established and younger scholars at the conference danced between the two. James Kloppenberg’s keynote speech, for instance, focused on the intellectual biography of Barack Obama to explain the deeper history behind the strange paradox of how the President is reviled on the right while, at the same time, met with such intense disappointment on the left.

Like many of the presentations at the conference, Kloppenberg’s talk drew upon his intellectual history “chops” to speak to contemporary political matters. For Kloppenberg, Obama’s own intellectual history provided insight into this enigmatic man. The President’s commitments to a pragmatist’s liberal vision of the United States’s democratic traditions—which turn up in Obama’s books and own education—temper his rhetoric and keep him focused on long-term social improvement while also allowing him to resist the polarizations of degraded contemporary political theater.

But despite the evidence in this marvelous keynote of the possibility that historians might move between specialized academic labor and a broader public culture, the tensions between getting out there into the world and getting in there into the academy lingered. Perhaps when it comes to the study of ideas, it’s still about the economy, stupid? Maybe. There was a sense that the tensions raised by the sharp question in the closing minutes of the conference were less about intellectual issues than institutional and economic ones. If, as the question suggested, the cultural critic of the twentieth-century is no more, if the intellectual as social type is dead, then what next for intellectual history as a public as well as a narrowly-professional concern?

George Cotkin proposed that he felt liberated to write adventurous intellectual history because of his position at a non-research university, but even those kind of academic jobs are few and far between these days, and the oversupply of able candidates for them is startling. So it is true, as Wilfred McClay pointed out, that the study of ideas remains vital both inside and outside academia even if the role of intellectual historians continues to be imperiled. But as Casey Blake essentially declared in his closing remarks, the research university may be dead for pursuing a true and only intellectual history. If civic education, teaching, and writing are still to be part of intellectual life, and intellectual historians are to participate fully in them, what institutional forms, then, should intellectual history work take? How should ideas play across time if there is no safety net below them?

Of course, there never has been a safety net, really. Both within the professional field of history and in the broad public beyond it, ideas still grow, blossom, go to seed, and bear fruit again with abundance. Blake mentioned the website The New Inquiry as an example of a new and hopeful concentration of intellectual energy, and rightly so. But is The New Inquiry an institution in the economic sense? Can it provide the sustenance necessary to sustain the intellect? What will provide the livelihood for lively intellectual engagement?

These institutional and economic questions for the life of the mind have always been fretful ones. There was no golden age for intellectuals in America, even when we look back nostalgically on the burgeoning fields of the Cold War research university or peer through the mists into the unkempt gardens of Greenwich Village or Harlem Renaissance bohemians. Nor, for that matter is today as bleak as it sometimes seems. And even though the current pressures are for the work of public intellectuals to be “relevant” and “do something,” one can be heartened by David Steigerwald’s assertion at the final session that the main reason to pursue intellectual history is not that studying ideas somehow exerts “resistance” or “oppositionality,” but rather that it is, simply put, dignified.

Dignity is something to ponder, and perhaps even something into which we can dig our roots. Dignity constitutes a kind of public act. And it can be a fertile emotion. But this dignity needs support. One task that the U.S. Intellectual History conference, once a blog, now growing into an organization, might address is the intellectual groundwork needed to foster a more expansive institutional space for the life of the mind.

Publics are atmospheric and amorphous. Intellectuals have and will continue to be resourceful in their cultivation. And those ideas, wherever they sprout, will remain hearty. The issue isn’t extinction, it’s robustness. The more we can eat, sleep, and breathe, the more we can eat, sleep, and breathe intellectual history.

So the question posed at the end of the conference really leads to two questions. First, in a world in which history still matters (see the recent uses of the past by Glenn Beck and others), what kind of new structures can make for a less shrill and more intellectual study of ideas? Second, if not the research university as it has existed for academic intellectual history, then what? Websites and social networks? Markets or state-run institutions or non-profit think-tanks or what?

Put another way, the question might be: how do we better institute intellectual history without institutionalizing it?

What is postmodernity and how does it relate to the culture wars?

I am the new regularly scheduled Friday blogger, but since I’ll be on a plane to Boston tomorrow for the annual History of Education Society meeting, I’m going to jump the gun by a day. My post relates, I think, to the excellent ongoing discussion between Paul Murphy and Michael Kramer in the comments section of my earlier post on the “Intellectual History for What?” plenary from our recent conference. How can we speak to a public when no such public, singular, exists? I think it also relates to Ray Haberski’s intriguing post yesterday about how war seems to be the only thing to draw Americans together anymore, the only thing around which a civil religion still exists.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I want to briefly answer the following two questions, or at least, get a discussion going: What is postmodernity? And how does it relate to the culture wars? These are really important questions that pertain to my thinking about the culture wars.

I define postmodernism as the fragmentation of what was once understood to be a singular public culture. Prior to the 1960s, which I consider the watershed years in U.S. history between modernity and postmodernity, it was possible for politicians, intellectuals, filmmakers, writers, etc., to address a single, common, if imagined public. The imagined part of this equation should not be forgotten, since people were always marginalized from the common American culture. But this speaks to my point. Once more people were brought into the common public—racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians— by the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it became more difficult to sustain a single, if flawed public or political culture. Fragmentation reigned supreme. The culture wars are best understood in terms of this fragmentation, and in terms of failed attempts to reestablish a common culture. This was a truly distressing turn of events for a public intellectual like Christopher Lasch. His biographer Eric Miller writes that “the crisis that so stirred Lasch is bound up in what we call ‘postmodernity,’ the vacuity of the name itself an indicator of the nature of the crisis.” “Lasch spent his life,” Miller believes, “slowly hammering out a way of seeing and living that could sustain hope amidst the grand fracturing of the age.” Such a temperament is so obviously imprinted upon Lasch’s students.

I also think postmodernism, and thus, the culture wars, relate to large social and economic shifts. This is not the same as saying the culture wars were epiphenomenal, which is to say that culture wars were unimportant relative to the economy. The writings of Fredric Jameson help me make sense of this vexing issue. In his famous 1984 New Left Review article, titled, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson attached the cultural particulars of postmodernity, especially fragmentation, to the postindustrial transformations of capitalism. The displacement of industry from the nation’s urban centers, accompanied by the new technologies of imagery that allowed capital to invade the human psyche beneath consciousness, spelled this out. “In psychological terms,” Jameson observed, “we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience.” Such a dream-like existence helped explain the prevalence of fragmented or postmodern thinking: “never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.” In a nation like the United States, premised on great metaphysical preoccupations—where God and the Constitution both made the nation a City on the Hill—fragmentation proved especially difficult to accept. The culture wars were how people responded to this.

After I presented some of this at USIH, I was asked by one astute audience member why other nations going through the shift from modernity to postmodernity, such as in Western Europe, did not also experience culture wars, at least nowhere near as intensely. This was a great question. And this is where history matters. The changes to American society in terms of race and sex relations were much more profound, akin to throwing gasoline (altered racial and sexual landscapes) on a fire (postmodernity).

What is postmodernity and how does it relate to the culture wars?

I am the new regularly scheduled Friday blogger, but since I’ll be on a plane to Boston tomorrow for the annual History of Education Society meeting, I’m going to jump the gun by a day. My post relates, I think, to the excellent ongoing discussion between Paul Murphy and Michael Kramer in the comments section of my earlier post on the “Intellectual History for What?” plenary from our recent conference. How can we speak to a public when no such public, singular, exists? I think it also relates to Ray Haberski’s intriguing post yesterday about how war seems to be the only thing to draw Americans together anymore, the only thing around which a civil religion still exists.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I want to briefly answer the following two questions, or at least, get a discussion going: What is postmodernity? And how does it relate to the culture wars? These are really important questions that pertain to my thinking about the culture wars.

I define postmodernism as the fragmentation of what was once understood to be a singular public culture. Prior to the 1960s, which I consider the watershed years in U.S. history between modernity and postmodernity, it was possible for politicians, intellectuals, filmmakers, writers, etc., to address a single, common, if imagined public. The imagined part of this equation should not be forgotten, since people were always marginalized from the common American culture. But this speaks to my point. Once more people were brought into the common public—racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians— by the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it became more difficult to sustain a single, if flawed public or political culture. Fragmentation reigned supreme. The culture wars are best understood in terms of this fragmentation, and in terms of failed attempts to reestablish a common culture. This was a truly distressing turn of events for a public intellectual like Christopher Lasch. His biographer Eric Miller writes that “the crisis that so stirred Lasch is bound up in what we call ‘postmodernity,’ the vacuity of the name itself an indicator of the nature of the crisis.” “Lasch spent his life,” Miller believes, “slowly hammering out a way of seeing and living that could sustain hope amidst the grand fracturing of the age.” Such a temperament is so obviously imprinted upon Lasch’s students.

I also think postmodernism, and thus, the culture wars, relate to large social and economic shifts. This is not the same as saying the culture wars were epiphenomenal, which is to say that culture wars were unimportant relative to the economy. The writings of Fredric Jameson help me make sense of this vexing issue. In his famous 1984 New Left Review article, titled, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson attached the cultural particulars of postmodernity, especially fragmentation, to the postindustrial transformations of capitalism. The displacement of industry from the nation’s urban centers, accompanied by the new technologies of imagery that allowed capital to invade the human psyche beneath consciousness, spelled this out. “In psychological terms,” Jameson observed, “we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience.” Such a dream-like existence helped explain the prevalence of fragmented or postmodern thinking: “never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.” In a nation like the United States, premised on great metaphysical preoccupations—where God and the Constitution both made the nation a City on the Hill—fragmentation proved especially difficult to accept. The culture wars were how people responded to this.

After I presented some of this at USIH, I was asked by one astute audience member why other nations going through the shift from modernity to postmodernity, such as in Western Europe, did not also experience culture wars, at least nowhere near as intensely. This was a great question. And this is where history matters. The changes to American society in terms of race and sex relations were much more profound, akin to throwing gasoline (altered racial and sexual landscapes) on a fire (postmodernity).