Wolfgang Koeppen's Journey through America

A translation of Wolfgang Koeppen's Journey through America, a travelogue published in 1959, is now available in English. S-USIH's Michael Kimmage, who is on this year's conference program again, is the translator. 

Michael writes: "The book is full of read meat for students of American intellectual history or full of fresh vegetables, depending on your taste."

A Commercial Republic: Democratic Capitalism in American Thought

I am very pleased to announce that one of our own, Mike O'Connor, the 2011 S-USIH Conference Committee Chair, has received an advance contract from the University Press of Kansas, to publish his book, A Commercial Republic: Democratic Capitalism in American Thought. Expect to see Mike's book on shelves sometime in 2013. I had the honor of reading large portions of the manuscript. I think it will make big waves. Congratulations Mike!

New Book: Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America

Dear Readers:

I would like to bring your attention to what looks like an extremely important book: Robert Genter's Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America. This is another in the excellent The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America from Penn Press, edited by Casey Nelson Blake. Here at UISH book reviews, we've already reviewed two books from this series. Tim Lacy reviewed Richard Cándida Smith's The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century. Tim also interviewed Professor Cándida Smith here. And I reviewed the Casey Nelson Blake edited The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State.

Here are a few enticing blurbs in support of Genter's new book:

"Late Modernism is a boldly original and undoubtedly controversial study of how modernism was transformed, assimilated, and sometimes institutionalized after 1945, before being challenged in the 1960s and 1970s. Exhaustively researched and lucidly argued, the book sheds light on a large, idiosyncratic cast of artists and thinkers, from David Riesman and C. Wright Mills to Jasper Johns and Kenneth Burke. It provides us with a fresh, illuminating synthesis as it tracks the eddies and crosscurrents of postwar American culture."
—Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden and Dancing in the Dark

"Late Modernism makes a profound contribution to the understanding of the history of modernism in American arts and letters in the mid-twentieth century. I do not know of anything currently available in intellectual and cultural history that offers such a striking reformulation of the course of modernist ideas and practices in the decades after World War II."—Howard Brick, author of Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s

New Book: Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America

Dear Readers:

I would like to bring your attention to what looks like an extremely important book: Robert Genter's Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America. This is another in the excellent The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America from Penn Press, edited by Casey Nelson Blake. Here at UISH book reviews, we've already reviewed two books from this series. Tim Lacy reviewed Richard Cándida Smith's The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century. Tim also interviewed Professor Cándida Smith here. And I reviewed the Casey Nelson Blake edited The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State.

Here are a few enticing blurbs in support of Genter's new book:

"Late Modernism is a boldly original and undoubtedly controversial study of how modernism was transformed, assimilated, and sometimes institutionalized after 1945, before being challenged in the 1960s and 1970s. Exhaustively researched and lucidly argued, the book sheds light on a large, idiosyncratic cast of artists and thinkers, from David Riesman and C. Wright Mills to Jasper Johns and Kenneth Burke. It provides us with a fresh, illuminating synthesis as it tracks the eddies and crosscurrents of postwar American culture."
—Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden and Dancing in the Dark

"Late Modernism makes a profound contribution to the understanding of the history of modernism in American arts and letters in the mid-twentieth century. I do not know of anything currently available in intellectual and cultural history that offers such a striking reformulation of the course of modernist ideas and practices in the decades after World War II."—Howard Brick, author of Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s

Tim's Light Reading (1/20/2010)

1. The Marketplace of Ideas: Louis Menand's new book---subtitled Reform and Resistance in American Universities---is getting a fair amount of attention. Here's a solid review in Slate.com, but I've seen other excellent reflections here (WSJ, Wilfred McClay) and here (Bookforum, Jessica Loudis).

2. Dissent's "Intellectuals and Their America": I'm very interested in this forum but have not yet had the time to explore it fully. Have you? Feel free to color my reading.

3. Graduate-level Liberal Arts---In Business Schools: So the NYT has unintentionally(?) documented the sorry state of liberal arts education in America by showing how a liberal arts mindset has to be remedially taught in graduate professional school. Maybe this foreshadows a burgeoning market for un/under-employed humanities PhDs?!

4. An Addition to the Annals of African-American Intellectual History: My online colleague Sharon Williams, editor of The Chicago History Journal (a weblog), has relayed some of the biography of the literary critic, Chicagoan, and former Duke University professor Kenny J. Williams (1927-2003).

5. An Upcoming Conference on Neoliberalism: My home institution, UIC, is planning a conference on neoliberalism courtesy of Walter Benn Michaels. I'm planning to attend, so let me know if you'll be there too.

6. Common Education Standards for Schools: E.D. Hirsch reflects on the weaknesses of the Common Core Standards Initiative sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. This initiative applies to college/university professor types because it deals with college readiness. And Hirsch believes a major weakness to be the lack of content standards---much of which deals directly with history, or at least historical topics.

7. Butler's Critical Americans: The October 2009 issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Vol. 8, no. 4) contains a review of Leslie Butler's Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform. The reviewer is Christopher McKnight Nichols.

8. Anti-intellectualism and Ignorance Today: This conspiracy-theory video on Obama, Catholicism, and domestic politics shows why we need to study intellectual history in America. I've never seen so much ignorance packed into a 3:36 minute clip. Wow.

9. For Fun: What type---meaning font---are you? The password is "character." I came up Expanded Antique; here's a sample.

Tim's Light Reading (1/20/2010)

1. The Marketplace of Ideas: Louis Menand's new book---subtitled Reform and Resistance in American Universities---is getting a fair amount of attention. Here's a solid review in Slate.com, but I've seen other excellent reflections here (WSJ, Wilfred McClay) and here (Bookforum, Jessica Loudis).

2. Dissent's "Intellectuals and Their America": I'm very interested in this forum but have not yet had the time to explore it fully. Have you? Feel free to color my reading.

3. Graduate-level Liberal Arts---In Business Schools: So the NYT has unintentionally(?) documented the sorry state of liberal arts education in America by showing how a liberal arts mindset has to be remedially taught in graduate professional school. Maybe this foreshadows a burgeoning market for un/under-employed humanities PhDs?!

4. An Addition to the Annals of African-American Intellectual History: My online colleague Sharon Williams, editor of The Chicago History Journal (a weblog), has relayed some of the biography of the literary critic, Chicagoan, and former Duke University professor Kenny J. Williams (1927-2003).

5. An Upcoming Conference on Neoliberalism: My home institution, UIC, is planning a conference on neoliberalism courtesy of Walter Benn Michaels. I'm planning to attend, so let me know if you'll be there too.

6. Common Education Standards for Schools: E.D. Hirsch reflects on the weaknesses of the Common Core Standards Initiative sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. This initiative applies to college/university professor types because it deals with college readiness. And Hirsch believes a major weakness to be the lack of content standards---much of which deals directly with history, or at least historical topics.

7. Butler's Critical Americans: The October 2009 issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Vol. 8, no. 4) contains a review of Leslie Butler's Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform. The reviewer is Christopher McKnight Nichols.

8. Anti-intellectualism and Ignorance Today: This conspiracy-theory video on Obama, Catholicism, and domestic politics shows why we need to study intellectual history in America. I've never seen so much ignorance packed into a 3:36 minute clip. Wow.

9. For Fun: What type---meaning font---are you? The password is "character." I came up Expanded Antique; here's a sample.