As I have described it in my Blogger profile, my dissertation will present "an intellectual history of an infamous, emblematic but still inadequately understood battle in the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s: the 'Great Books' debate at Stanford University."
One of the major ideas I am/will be paying attention to is the idea of canonicity -- literary canons, cultural canons, disciplinary canons. This is why both E.D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom, the Mutt and Jeff of cultural literacy during the 1980s, are on my reading list. They are two among many primary sources that I will be using in order to sketch out the broader cultural landscape within which and/or against which the particular debate at Stanford took place.
At some point -- and I haven't quite identified that point yet -- the debate about canons and canonicity shifts from a historic moment that I am examining to a current critical discourse into which I am, as the argot of academe has it, "making an intervention." This is one of the (many!) tricky methodological challenges of my dissertation. In order to manage this move -- and I think it will be an oscillation, a move back and forth between what I might call "the historic debate" and "the current debate about the stakes of the debate" -- I need to develop my own canon (or, if I simply must abandon irony for the good of the collective, my own list) of works that address notions of canonicity and cultural value since the 1980s.*
So far, my list includes such authors as John Guillory, Evan Watkins, Walter Benn Michaels, Gerald Graff, and Henry Louis Gates. I should probably add Stanley Fish too. Lawrence Levine fits here as well -- Highbrow/Lowbrow was published after the Stanford kerfuffle, though very close to it. And the wonderful anthology edited by David Richter, Falling into Theory, points toward a number of authors with whom I will need to be in conversation.
But I would be more than happy to hear from our readers (and my blog colleagues!) on this question. If you can think of other works that ought to be on my radar screen, feel free to add them in the comments section below.
______________
*Now, my canon on the canon question before the 1980s is an entirely separate list. So far it includes, among others, guys like Matthew Arnold, F.O. Matthiessen, Leslie Fiedler, Lionel Trilling. And yes, they are all guys.
Tampilkan postingan dengan label reading lists. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label reading lists. Tampilkan semua postingan
Sabtu, 01 Desember 2012
Jumat, 27 Juli 2012
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)
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)
Jumat, 08 Juni 2012
The Fracas
As I mentioned in a recent post, I have been working through the historiography/theory section of my exam reading list. I am on the home stretch -- finished Haskell and Wickberg yesterday, with only Megill and Klein to go. I hope to turn the last page of Klein by the middle of next week, if not before.
What I am most enjoying about this section of my reading list, especially these texts published since the mid-80s, is the way historians routinely and collegially challenge each other's assumptions and interpretations. Novick defines an objectivity that never existed and proceeds to objectively (for the most part) explore its fall from favor. Haskell takes Novick to task for confusing objectivity with neutrality. Haskell takes White to task for (among other things) eschewing revolutions even as he calls for revolutionary historiography. Wickberg takes Haskell to task for exploring the causes of the "humanitarian sensibility" without exploring the sensibility.
This whole section of my list illustrates very well the dynamic that Haskell describes in some his essays on the professionalization of the academy, the emergence of disciplines, and the epistemological ground of academic freedom. In Haskell's reading, the Peircean community of the competent is collegially competitive, a "miniature market":
Sometimes that defense of professional standards and values can prove problematic. Both Haskell and Novick examine a few recent (for the 1980s) cases of community policing of professional standards: the David Abraham case and the Sears workplace discrimination lawsuit. Novick viewed the Abraham case as an example of professional gatekeeping run amok; for Haskell, the response of feminist historians to the testimony of Rosalind Rosenberg was a case of "intellectually indefensible"*** partisan advocacy. It is worth noting -- and Novick and Haskell both mention the fact -- that both were "partisans" in these respective conflicts, which in some ways makes the incidents all the more suitable as examples of where the professional gets personal.
Overall, though, the discourse of the academic community is a fairly friendly fracas. Or so it appears to me now. But the fracas may seem congenial to me only because I haven't really gotten scrappy yet. I have yet put to forward an idea in the academy that I'm willing to fight for -- I mean, really fight. And that's a good thing, because I'm not ready yet. My idea isn't ready yet. But it will be. And part of getting myself ready for the intense competition of professional academic discourse involves a careful study of how intellectual historians argue, with perhaps the occasional sparring match on this blog.
All in good fun -- until it's My Awesome Idea on the line.
Nah, it'll still be fun.
__________________
*Thomas Haskell, "Professionalism versus Capitalism," Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 111.
**109.
***163
What I am most enjoying about this section of my reading list, especially these texts published since the mid-80s, is the way historians routinely and collegially challenge each other's assumptions and interpretations. Novick defines an objectivity that never existed and proceeds to objectively (for the most part) explore its fall from favor. Haskell takes Novick to task for confusing objectivity with neutrality. Haskell takes White to task for (among other things) eschewing revolutions even as he calls for revolutionary historiography. Wickberg takes Haskell to task for exploring the causes of the "humanitarian sensibility" without exploring the sensibility.
This whole section of my list illustrates very well the dynamic that Haskell describes in some his essays on the professionalization of the academy, the emergence of disciplines, and the epistemological ground of academic freedom. In Haskell's reading, the Peircean community of the competent is collegially competitive, a "miniature market":
It is a market in which people compete not for money, but for the affective currency of criticism: fame instead of disgrace; honor in place of shame; compliments, not complaints, about the technical worth of one's work. What each competitor strives to accumulate in this special "countervailing" market is not capital, but reputation, a stock of favorable impressions of himself and his work in the minds of his peers. Since people do not necessarily lose self-esteem when they bestow praise on others, the competitors in this market are not playing a strictly zero-sum game, and the spirit of their competition is consequently often relaxed and friendly. But esteem is not limitless in supply, and the deeply personal character of the productions and performances being criticized can charge the competition in this market with explosive emotional force.*Collegiality is precisely what intensifies this "deeply personal" competition, while at the same time absorbing and channeling some of that intensity in ways that build camaraderie instead of undermining it. Says Haskell:
The community's achievement of "logical goodness" depends not only on conflict and competition but also on its members' adherence to such collegial values as honesty, a degree of tolerance (give one's own susceptibility to error), dedication to the resolution of conflicts, willingness to be persuaded by evidence, logic, and reason, and so on.**Those "collegial values" presuppose professional standards, including the standards of membership: who is and who is not part of the community of inquiry. These values are enforced and reinforced via the collective approval or opprobrium of the disciplinary community.
Sometimes that defense of professional standards and values can prove problematic. Both Haskell and Novick examine a few recent (for the 1980s) cases of community policing of professional standards: the David Abraham case and the Sears workplace discrimination lawsuit. Novick viewed the Abraham case as an example of professional gatekeeping run amok; for Haskell, the response of feminist historians to the testimony of Rosalind Rosenberg was a case of "intellectually indefensible"*** partisan advocacy. It is worth noting -- and Novick and Haskell both mention the fact -- that both were "partisans" in these respective conflicts, which in some ways makes the incidents all the more suitable as examples of where the professional gets personal.
Overall, though, the discourse of the academic community is a fairly friendly fracas. Or so it appears to me now. But the fracas may seem congenial to me only because I haven't really gotten scrappy yet. I have yet put to forward an idea in the academy that I'm willing to fight for -- I mean, really fight. And that's a good thing, because I'm not ready yet. My idea isn't ready yet. But it will be. And part of getting myself ready for the intense competition of professional academic discourse involves a careful study of how intellectual historians argue, with perhaps the occasional sparring match on this blog.
All in good fun -- until it's My Awesome Idea on the line.
Nah, it'll still be fun.
__________________
*Thomas Haskell, "Professionalism versus Capitalism," Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 111.
**109.
***163
Jumat, 25 Mei 2012
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:
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:
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.
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.I have been thinking a great deal lately about the value of history, the value of being -- or becoming -- a historian.
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.
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)From Collingwood:
"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)
"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)From Stern:
"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)
"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)From Niebuhr (in Stern):
"...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)
"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)From Macaulay (in Stern):
"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)
"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)From Droysen (in Stern):
"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)
"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.
Jumat, 11 Mei 2012
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)
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)
Sabtu, 14 April 2012
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.
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.
Rabu, 31 Agustus 2011
The All-TIME 100 Best Non-Fiction Books
That's "TIME" as in TIME Magazine. And "All-TIME" as in "written in English since TIME started publishing in 1923" (so no surprise appearances from Lucretius, Judah Halevi, Margaret Fuller or J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur).
TIME magazine published their list yesterday. While obviously of limited real significance and predictably full of questionable inclusions and exclusions, this is obvious U.S. Intellectual History fodder, as a starting point both for endless arguments about what should and shouldn't be on the list and for discussions of what this all says about American thought and culture in 2011.
Have at it! (Complete list after the fold...)
TIME magazine published their list yesterday. While obviously of limited real significance and predictably full of questionable inclusions and exclusions, this is obvious U.S. Intellectual History fodder, as a starting point both for endless arguments about what should and shouldn't be on the list and for discussions of what this all says about American thought and culture in 2011.
Have at it! (Complete list after the fold...)
Autobiography / Memoir
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
- Black Boy by Richard Wright
- Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
- Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
- Maus by Art Spiegelman
- A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
- Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
- On Writing by Stephen King
- Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
Biography
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
- The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill by William Manchester
- The Power Broker by Robert Caro
Business
- Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
- Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
- The General Theory by John Maynard Keynes
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- No Logo by Naomi Klein
- Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader
- What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles
Culture
- The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris
- A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht
- Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow
- Mystery Train by Greil Marcus
- The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich
Essays
- Against Interpretation, and Other Essays by Susan Sontag
- A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
Food Writing
- How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher
- Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child
- The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Health
- And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
- The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock
- The Joy of Sex by Dr. Alex Comfort
- The Kinsey Reports by Alfred Kinsey
- Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective
History
- The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
- Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter
- The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
- The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee
- A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
Ideas
- The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
- The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
- Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
- Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
- The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr
- Orientalism by Edward Said
- Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky
- A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
- Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
Nonfiction Novels
- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
- The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
Politics
- All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
- The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington
- Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater
- God & Man at Yale by William F. Buckley Jr.
- Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
- The Making of the President by Theodore White
- The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
- The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter
- What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer
Science
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
- The Double Helix by James Watson
- The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
- The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
- The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
- On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
Self-Help / Instructional
Social History
- The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford
- Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
- The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
- Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
- Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
- The Other America by Michael Harrington
- Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King Jr.
- Working by Studs Terkel
Sports
War
- The Civil War by Shelby Foote
- Dispatches by Michael Herr
- The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
- Hiroshima by John Hersey
- The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
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