In the Lists: Reading for Exams

Though the time of trial is still a year away, I have begun to prepare in earnest for my (in)glorious combat in the lists:  the ordeal of qualifying exams.

At this point, my preparations involve hammering out the reading lists for my fields:  American intellectual and cultural history (soup to nuts), American literature (Early Republic to the day before yesterday), and Transatlantic history in the long 19th century (1776-1924).

At my institution, the process begins manageably enough:  I provide the profs supervising my fields with a preliminary list of texts I think I need to read, and then we make additions and changes from there.  One value of having us students come up with the first list ourselves is that it gives our profs a benchmark for assessing our initial understanding (or lack thereof) of our fields.  Do we have a sense of the basic boundaries, the major landmarks, or are we wandering lost in a trackless epistemic wasteland?  That would be problematic.

Fortunately, those who have traveled this ground before me have left some trail markers to guide me and other grad students along the way.  Indeed, some of the most helpful navigation aids for putting together a preliminary list are embedded in others' posts and comments on this very blog.

For those of you putting together exam lists (or syllabi), I want to call your attention to several past posts on USIH that have featured discussions of "must-read" texts in U.S. intellectual history, U.S. history in general, the "long 19th century," and so forth:

Secondary sources in U.S. intellectual history

A Canon of U.S. Intellectual History

A Reading List for the Long Nineteenth Century

The U.S. History Canon

A truly canonical U.S. history list

Perhaps putting these links together in one blog post will be helpful to those who come after me on this pilgrim pathway.  But as you can see from the posts and their dates, I'm certainly not the one blazing this trail.  Thanks to Mike O'Connor and David Sehat for taking up these questions, and thanks to the other commenters on their posts for participating in the discussion and adding their suggestions.  Most helpful.

I am sure to end up with a reading list for U.S. intellectual history that is somewhat different from the (combined) suggestions of these posts.  But this isn't a bad place to start.

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Addendum, June 3, 2012 1:10 AM:

I have since finalized my reading list for U.S. Intellectual and Cultural history; I have posted it here.

A Baker's Dozen Awe-Inspiring Cultural and Intellectual Histories

[Editor's Note: Today's guest post comes from George Cotkin, Professor of Postwar United States Intellectual and Cultural History, California Polytechnic State University. Enjoy! - TL]


How often are we both propelled and burdened by great works of cultural and intellectual history? They serve as our models; they sing with their insight, style, and grace.

On my desk I have arranged a lucky thirteen titles. They mock me often and they make me want to stop my own work and read them. They are books that I admire, that I wish I had written.

They all deal with topics in our field. Only one of them is a biography of a single figure. There are other titles, outside the field of intellectual history, I admire equally or that have influenced my life. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, come to mind immediately.

Do these volumes share anything in common? I think that all of them escape the confines of the pedestrian or academic. Many of them fail but in a heroic manner. All of them ooze sophistication and deep learning. And all of them, in my view, are written with verve.

Here are my baker’s dozen of books that I hold in awe (alphabetically, by author):

Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967

Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties

Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s

Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud

Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper

David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets

Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

Robert Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885-World War I

I am sure that you are bewitched by your own set of favorites. Care to share them?

The Good Book

During MSNBC's coverage of the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address this past January 24, Rachel Maddow took issue with Gov. Mitch Daniels's description of America as  the "shining city on the hill."  She was irked by what she sees as a spurious addition to John Winthrop's famous metaphor from his 1630 sermon aboard the Arabella:  "...for wee must Consider that wee shall  be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us."*

What bothered Maddow was the presence of the word "shining," a word that does not appear in Winthrop's phrasing. 

"We are going take a quick break," Maddow said at the end of her segment with Chris Matthews. "The city on the hill will not be shining when we come back. It doesn't need to shine. John Winthrop just talked about it being up there, in the eyes of the world upon it. That was it. Shining thing was a late addition. I'm sorry. Bugs me. Up next, we'll be talking with Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Obama. We'll be right back. It's not shining. It's not."

That "late addition" to which Maddow referred is found in Ronald Reagan's deployment of the "city on a hill" metaphor at the end of his November 1979 speech announcing his intent to seek the Republican nomination.  In his closing remarks, Reagan invoked Winthrop's address aboard the Arabella and repurposed the metaphor for his own candidacy as a "rendezvous with destiny":

We who are privileged to be Americans have had a rendezvous with destiny since the moment in 1630 when John Winthrop, standing on the deck of the tiny Arabella off the coast of Massachusetts, told the little band of pilgrims, “We shall be as a city upon a hill.  The eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.” 

A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and—above all—responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.

For her part, Maddow seemed to be piqued that Reagan's "shining city on a hill," a go-to metaphor for Republican politicians ever since, represents not merely an addition to Winthrop's phrasing but also a distortion of Winthrop's meaning.

Clearly, Rachel Maddow does not know her Bible.

John Winthrop's metaphor is taken from a passage found in Matthew's version of the "Sermon on the Mount," in which Jesus talks to his disciples about letting their light shine:

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.
 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.
 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.  (Matt. 5:14-16)

Winthrop's hearers, well-versed in the Bible, would have immediately recognized his metaphor and just as immediately associated it with its scriptural context and connotations. For them, the "City upon a Hill" was implicitly shining -- as it was for the "Moral majority" voters of the 1980s who apparently responded very well to this scriptural reframing of American exceptionalism.

My point here is not that Maddow is somehow incorrect to point out that John Winthrop didn't describe the City as "shining."  Of course she is correct.  But her point is politically irrelevant.  Most Americans probably don't connect this phrase to John Winthrop at all, and pointing out that he didn't say the City was shining will not in any way affect how this modified metaphor resonates with many who hear it.  The "shining city on a hill" will continue to make an appearance in American political rhetoric because it evokes a familiar text that remains as central to the lives of many Americans today as it was to the lives of the Puritans aboard the Arabella.

There is no single text or set of texts that has been more influential in American intellectual history than the Bible.  The (Protestant) Christian scriptures have shaped the political, cultural, social, and intellectual discourse in the U.S. since its colonial days.  Yes, there are other equally crucial influences -- but none more influential than the Bible. 

The Bible is a key primary text for U.S. intellectual history.  It has been read, re-read, misread, used, misused, repurposed and used again, quoted and misquoted, revered and reviled, throughout American history, by a fairly sizable number of Americans.  However its meanings have been construed at different moments, by different groups of people, the Bible -- not merely its theological content or narrative incidents but its very language -- has persisted as an integral part of the conceptual framework within which American thought continues to take shape. 

Am I suggesting that it is necessary for a U.S. intellectual historian to be familiar with the Bible?  No.  But it couldn't hurt.  Indeed, it could be quite helpful.  If what we are about is understanding the sense that people have made of their world, and the underlying sensibility from which that meaning-making emerges, we really need to pay attention to the texts and the ideas that were important to them and to the world within which (and sometimes against which) they lived -- not just what those texts were, but what those texts said, and what those people used the texts to say.

Those of us who were (un)fortunate enough to grow up going to Sunday School and Children's Church (and Bible Study and Prayer Group and Vacation Bible School, ad infinitum, ad nauseum) are at an advantage here.  It is beyond easy for someone like me to read William Lloyd Garrison or William James, W.E.B. DuBois or Martin Luther King Jr., Jane Addams or Henry Luce, and recognize when and how they are invoking the language of scripture, and to what rhetorical effect.  I don't need footnotes to tell me the source of their phrasing or the meaning of their allusions.  This is a real boon when it comes to understanding the ideas at play in a particular text and placing that thought within a larger context. 

Don't get me wrong:  the idea of sitting down to read the Bible is no more pleasant for me than it might be for someone who was not brought up to know it backwards and forwards.  In fact, it's probably a good deal less pleasant for me than it would be for those who can approach the text without quite so much, well, history.   Nevertheless, the durability and ubiquity of the Bible as a common cultural referent throughout American history -- a source and resource of thought accessible and appropriated across lines of race, class and gender -- combined with its plasticity as a text from which multiple meanings have been shaped and reshaped at each new moment in American thought, should make it an indispensable primary source for U.S. intellectual historians.

So, brothers and sisters, I urge you -- certainly not by the mercies of God, but rather by the exigencies of doing first-rate U.S. intellectual history -- to bite the bullet, take your medicine, and read your Bible.



----------------
*Winthrop, "A Modell of Christian Charity," in Hollinger and Capper, The American Intellectual Tradition, vol. 1, pp. 6-15 (p. 15).

A truly canonical U.S. history list

A little over a month ago, I posted what I claimed was a canonical list for U.S. history after 1800 and asked readers for their feedback. The suggestions and questions were good, challenging the parameters of the list, questioning the lack of certain subspecialities (particularly diplomatic history), and offering books for addition and deletion.

But my overall take-away from that exercise was that the list was still too large. There was too much room for interest and specialization, for taste and for the happenstance of reading. The only way to get a truly canonical list--by which I realized I meant a list that no one could possibly quibble with, that everyone should have read, that provides paradigmatic exemplars for multiple fields--would be to shorten the list. At first I thought fifty books would be enough, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought that fifty books still left too much room for idiosyncrasy. So I've shortened the list to thirty books, added some that I inexplicably left off before (such as William Appleman Williams) and deleting a whole bunch more.

The general criterion for inclusion on the list is that it is ground-breaking and paradigm creating--that all the books written after the canonical book would feel the subtle force of its magnetic field. Roll, Jordan, Roll might be the quintessential example of the kind of book I have in mind. Even though it is now old and much has been written since then, I don't think that many would claim that its paradigm has been overturned and even those who want to move beyond it must still contend with it. That is a canonical book. There are some others that are not as clear. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson is a less clear example. On the one hand, the force of book is still felt in the way that people understand the antebellum United States, so much so that almost any discussion of the period implicitly begins with assumptions arising from his work. On the other hand, his inattention to women, African Americans, Indians, and his real disinterest in the Whigs, has become so egregious that it is hard to turn to the book as a credible secondary source anymore. Fortunately, the still salient parts of his paradigm have been updated in a new synthesis by Sean Wilentz in The Rise of Democracy, so The Age of Jackson can be dropped from the list.

There are some other questionable choices that I am not entirely comfortable with: contrary to the suggestion of Dan Wickberg, I've left off Hofstadter's Age of Reform. Can I justify this? I'm not sure. My impression is that Hofstadter is widely viewed as wrong in his separation of populism, progressivism, and the New Deal from one another, and in his connection of each with a portion of the population at each movement's apex. I think (and I could be wrong) that Rodgers's book, Atlantic Crossings, has superseded Hofstadter's, by showing how each movement fed into the next and by placing this moment in a trans-Atlantic context. I also could have put on James Kloppenberg's Uncertain Victory, so I'm not entirely comfortable with the choice.

The resulting list is somewhat odd, not aiming at chronological coverage, exactly, and not attempting to incorporate all subdisciplines, but simply attempting to come up with thirty books that everyone should have read because of their ability to shape historical writing after them. This is a list of books that a graduate student approaching comps would have heard of and probably would think, based on his or her other reading, that they should have read. But if this fictional graduate student's training was anything like mine, he or she will not have read these books because the books most often assigned in seminars are newer books that are still responding to the canonical books without quite overcoming them.

Since this is supposed to be a fun(?) historiographical exercise, let's keep the rules in place from last time. Whether you think my list is totally wrong-headed, flawed in the particulars, or spot on, feel free to register your thoughts in the comments section. But if you suggest additions, suggest an equal number of deletions. And, of course, we have to keep in mind that there is a certain absurdity to all of this (of which I am aware). As Joe Posnanski pointed out in an article on what he called "The Willie Mays Hall of Fame" (a truly brilliant piece, by the way), in coming up with such a list the principles of selection are still idiosyncratic and, when we are forced to articulate them, verge on the ridiculous. So now that I have undermined the exercise, here is the really, truly, super, duper canonical list in U.S. History!!

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (2007).
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (2005)
Eugene D Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974)
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988)
Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood (1977)
Dave Roedeger, The Wages of Whiteness, Rev. Ed. (2007)
Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1989).
Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (1998)
David Blight, Race and Reunion (2001)
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1995)
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (1991).
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (1982)
Robert H Wiebe, The Search for Order (1968)
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow 3rd ed. (1974)
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings (1998)
T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place for Grace (1981)
Warren Susman, Culture as History
Michael Kazin, Populist Persuasion (1995)
George Chauncey, Gay New York (1994)
John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 2nd ed. (1992)
Henry F. May, End of American Innocence, Columbia University Press Morningside edition (1992).
Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (1990)
John Dower, War without Mercy (1986)
Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority (2006)
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, Rev. ed. (2008)
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996).
Bruce Schulman, The Seventies (2001)
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors (2001)
William Appleman Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959)

A truly canonical U.S. history list

A little over a month ago, I posted what I claimed was a canonical list for U.S. history after 1800 and asked readers for their feedback. The suggestions and questions were good, challenging the parameters of the list, questioning the lack of certain subspecialities (particularly diplomatic history), and offering books for addition and deletion.

But my overall take-away from that exercise was that the list was still too large. There was too much room for interest and specialization, for taste and for the happenstance of reading. The only way to get a truly canonical list--by which I realized I meant a list that no one could possibly quibble with, that everyone should have read, that provides paradigmatic exemplars for multiple fields--would be to shorten the list. At first I thought fifty books would be enough, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought that fifty books still left too much room for idiosyncrasy. So I've shortened the list to thirty books, added some that I inexplicably left off before (such as William Appleman Williams) and deleting a whole bunch more.

The general criterion for inclusion on the list is that it is ground-breaking and paradigm creating--that all the books written after the canonical book would feel the subtle force of its magnetic field. Roll, Jordan, Roll might be the quintessential example of the kind of book I have in mind. Even though it is now old and much has been written since then, I don't think that many would claim that its paradigm has been overturned and even those who want to move beyond it must still contend with it. That is a canonical book. There are some others that are not as clear. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson is a less clear example. On the one hand, the force of book is still felt in the way that people understand the antebellum United States, so much so that almost any discussion of the period implicitly begins with assumptions arising from his work. On the other hand, his inattention to women, African Americans, Indians, and his real disinterest in the Whigs, has become so egregious that it is hard to turn to the book as a credible secondary source anymore. Fortunately, the still salient parts of his paradigm have been updated in a new synthesis by Sean Wilentz in The Rise of Democracy, so The Age of Jackson can be dropped from the list.

There are some other questionable choices that I am not entirely comfortable with: contrary to the suggestion of Dan Wickberg, I've left off Hofstadter's Age of Reform. Can I justify this? I'm not sure. My impression is that Hofstadter is widely viewed as wrong in his separation of populism, progressivism, and the New Deal from one another, and in his connection of each with a portion of the population at each movement's apex. I think (and I could be wrong) that Rodgers's book, Atlantic Crossings, has superseded Hofstadter's, by showing how each movement fed into the next and by placing this moment in a trans-Atlantic context. I also could have put on James Kloppenberg's Uncertain Victory, so I'm not entirely comfortable with the choice.

The resulting list is somewhat odd, not aiming at chronological coverage, exactly, and not attempting to incorporate all subdisciplines, but simply attempting to come up with thirty books that everyone should have read because of their ability to shape historical writing after them. This is a list of books that a graduate student approaching comps would have heard of and probably would think, based on his or her other reading, that they should have read. But if this fictional graduate student's training was anything like mine, he or she will not have read these books because the books most often assigned in seminars are newer books that are still responding to the canonical books without quite overcoming them.

Since this is supposed to be a fun(?) historiographical exercise, let's keep the rules in place from last time. Whether you think my list is totally wrong-headed, flawed in the particulars, or spot on, feel free to register your thoughts in the comments section. But if you suggest additions, suggest an equal number of deletions. And, of course, we have to keep in mind that there is a certain absurdity to all of this (of which I am aware). As Joe Posnanski pointed out in an article on what he called "The Willie Mays Hall of Fame" (a truly brilliant piece, by the way), in coming up with such a list the principles of selection are still idiosyncratic and, when we are forced to articulate them, verge on the ridiculous. So now that I have undermined the exercise, here is the really, truly, super, duper canonical list in U.S. History!!

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (2007).
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (2005)
Eugene D Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974)
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988)
Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood (1977)
Dave Roedeger, The Wages of Whiteness, Rev. Ed. (2007)
Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1989).
Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (1998)
David Blight, Race and Reunion (2001)
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1995)
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (1991).
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (1982)
Robert H Wiebe, The Search for Order (1968)
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow 3rd ed. (1974)
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings (1998)
T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place for Grace (1981)
Warren Susman, Culture as History
Michael Kazin, Populist Persuasion (1995)
George Chauncey, Gay New York (1994)
John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 2nd ed. (1992)
Henry F. May, End of American Innocence, Columbia University Press Morningside edition (1992).
Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (1990)
John Dower, War without Mercy (1986)
Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority (2006)
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, Rev. ed. (2008)
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996).
Bruce Schulman, The Seventies (2001)
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors (2001)
William Appleman Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959)