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)

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.

------------
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.

Missives from the OAH: State of the Field

I was late to today's panel on the State of the Field in US Intellectual History because I was chatting with a publisher. I invited those present to continue the conversation here, so I hope many will do so. I'll have more analysis on a future post about the afternoon's panel on Black Women's Intellectual History. Let me summarize the comments by James Kloppenburg and the audience (the pieces I did hear):


Kloppenburg said that he imagines the field will continue to be dominated by the study of individuals and biography. That it will focus on expression rather than lived experience, because that is all we can access through texts. That race, gender, and ethnicities will be part of the conversation.

He urged us to have a division of labor, so that some will study ideas and textual content, while others will study production and reception of texts

He suggested that there will be vertical, horizontal, and technological growth in intellectual history.
Vertical: continued expansion in religious questions. Consider the new text "For God and Wallmart"
History of social movements.
Since the 1960s, social history has become cultural history through discussion of meaning making.
Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution
Enslaved Atlantic--universal rights ideas circulating among slaves, even if not literate
Inventing "The American Way" The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement, which is social, cutltural, political and intellectual history
Legal History--much of the current work on the constitution

Horizontal
Transnational Studies, Leslie Butler, Angus Burgin
Shifting from Atlantic Studies to connections between the US and Asia (particularly South Asia)
Trans-disciplinary studies, because intellectual historians can be found in many different, diverse departments and disciplines.

Technological
Access to quantity of texts, which presents an opportunity and a challenge. Our discipline and methodologies are important to make sure that people continue to consider the meaning--the why--not just counting evidence and concluding the what and how.

We will continue to be relevant as we understand the past on its own terms and interpret its relevance for the future.

Question and Answers

Jeffrey Sklansky: "Pragmatism is for Intellectual History what Marxism was for Social History"

"Is division of labor the only way to overcome the problem of how hard it is and how long it takes to learn one person's thought?"
Kloppenburg said in response that he has been very dependent upon other historians to be able to contextualize the individuals he has studed throughout his career. He finds Review Essays to be deeply valuable to keep up with growing fields that are impossible to master.

Charles Capper--our job is to faciliate interaction, negotiate discourses. Self-reflection, cultural capital, conversations broaden field.

Joan Rubin--quoting someone whose name I didn't catch "Artists' use of language is the highest form of cultural history"
Both quantitative and qualitative are right. Large numbers need quantiative analysis to understand and demonstrate influence. In terms of experience, we can talk about a lone individual.

Hollinger reminded us to look at distinctions (social, cultural, political, intellectual) modestly in terms of insittutions and administrative politics. Space in departments, journals are chosen in part by making sure that all these different areas are covered, because it make sures that no kinds of questions are ignored. Intellectual History remains important as a label because it preserves things like:

History of philosophy, literary criticism, art, sociology, political science, theology, etc.

Those things aren't being done by cultural history.

Rubin--US Intellectual History conference panel on this same question was very different because of traing and traditions. Moral dimension in terms of critique of materials (rather than, perhaps, George Cotkin's Morality's Muddy Waters).

Missives from the OAH: State of the Field

I was late to today's panel on the State of the Field in US Intellectual History because I was chatting with a publisher. I invited those present to continue the conversation here, so I hope many will do so. I'll have more analysis on a future post about the afternoon's panel on Black Women's Intellectual History. Let me summarize the comments by James Kloppenburg and the audience (the pieces I did hear):


Kloppenburg said that he imagines the field will continue to be dominated by the study of individuals and biography. That it will focus on expression rather than lived experience, because that is all we can access through texts. That race, gender, and ethnicities will be part of the conversation.

He urged us to have a division of labor, so that some will study ideas and textual content, while others will study production and reception of texts

He suggested that there will be vertical, horizontal, and technological growth in intellectual history.
Vertical: continued expansion in religious questions. Consider the new text "For God and Wallmart"
History of social movements.
Since the 1960s, social history has become cultural history through discussion of meaning making.
Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution
Enslaved Atlantic--universal rights ideas circulating among slaves, even if not literate
Inventing "The American Way" The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement, which is social, cutltural, political and intellectual history
Legal History--much of the current work on the constitution

Horizontal
Transnational Studies, Leslie Butler, Angus Burgin
Shifting from Atlantic Studies to connections between the US and Asia (particularly South Asia)
Trans-disciplinary studies, because intellectual historians can be found in many different, diverse departments and disciplines.

Technological
Access to quantity of texts, which presents an opportunity and a challenge. Our discipline and methodologies are important to make sure that people continue to consider the meaning--the why--not just counting evidence and concluding the what and how.

We will continue to be relevant as we understand the past on its own terms and interpret its relevance for the future.

Question and Answers

Jeffrey Sklansky: "Pragmatism is for Intellectual History what Marxism was for Social History"

"Is division of labor the only way to overcome the problem of how hard it is and how long it takes to learn one person's thought?"
Kloppenburg said in response that he has been very dependent upon other historians to be able to contextualize the individuals he has studed throughout his career. He finds Review Essays to be deeply valuable to keep up with growing fields that are impossible to master.

Charles Capper--our job is to faciliate interaction, negotiate discourses. Self-reflection, cultural capital, conversations broaden field.

Joan Rubin--quoting someone whose name I didn't catch "Artists' use of language is the highest form of cultural history"
Both quantitative and qualitative are right. Large numbers need quantiative analysis to understand and demonstrate influence. In terms of experience, we can talk about a lone individual.

Hollinger reminded us to look at distinctions (social, cultural, political, intellectual) modestly in terms of insittutions and administrative politics. Space in departments, journals are chosen in part by making sure that all these different areas are covered, because it make sures that no kinds of questions are ignored. Intellectual History remains important as a label because it preserves things like:

History of philosophy, literary criticism, art, sociology, political science, theology, etc.

Those things aren't being done by cultural history.

Rubin--US Intellectual History conference panel on this same question was very different because of traing and traditions. Moral dimension in terms of critique of materials (rather than, perhaps, George Cotkin's Morality's Muddy Waters).