American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
American Thought

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction provides an introduction to the history of American thought from the sixteenth century up until the present. Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European commentators and explorers. American thought grew from this foundation of expectation and experience, both enriched and challenged over the centuries by developments including the Revolutionary War, westward expansion, the rise of capitalism, the proliferation of diverse religions, immigration, industrialization, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower. This introduction provides an overview of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American thought, while showing how ideas have been major forces driving the course of American history.

The Significance of the Frontier in American Knowledge

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Cameron B. Strang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
History Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History

This chapter introduces the history of knowledge in the Gulf South and why it matters to American intellectual history on the whole. It also presents the book’s main argument, which is that encounters in America’s borderlands shaped the production, circulation, and application of natural knowledge within these contested regions and, more broadly, throughout the empires and nations competing for them. The expansion of European powers and the United States were the primary motors that drove these encounters. Between the 1500s and the mid-1800s, Spanish, British, French, and U.S. imperialism brought hitherto unconnected individuals, nations, and environments into intellectually productive (though often physically destructive) contact. These expansion-instigated encounters, moreover, resulted in new material, social, and political circumstances that influenced how people created and shared natural knowledge.

READING LIBERAL THEOLOGY

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-470
Author(s):  
J. DAVID HOEVELER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Liberal Theology ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
Rich Content

Gary Dorrien has presented to all who have an interest in religion, and religious ideas especially, a magnificent piece of scholarship. These three volumes on liberal theology in the United States have value in the massive amount of writings they bring under study and into the mainstream of American intellectual history. To that extent they address a historiographical gap; conservative thinking in the long evangelical tradition down to the contemporary “religious right” has received greater attention. Liberal theology, as Dorrien treats it, interconnects with a wide range of ideas—in philosophy, science, and history most importantly, and other topical maters like feminism and race. This trilogy should attract the attention of intellectual historians not only for its rich content but also for the suggestions it has for this discipline itself; that is, for practicing intellectual history and recognizing some of the contrasting approaches to its subject matter.

Bantu in the Crystal Ball, I

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 287-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Crystal Ball ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
Vast Area

More than one-third of Africa is occupied by people who speak related languages belonging to a single family called Bantu. This has been recognized for more than a century. As early as 1886 Harry Johnston argued that this situation was the result of differentiation from a real single ancestral language, later called UrBantu or Proto-Bantu. The inevitable question arises: How could one language or a group of closely related dialects diffuse over such a vast area? The fact of Bantu expansion remains a major puzzle in the history of Africa. Many have risen to the bait of solving it.My main goal here is to recount the salient features of this century-long inquiry and in doing so to lead to an assessment of the present situation. Given the nature and the paucity of the available data, much of proposed reconstruction has been conjectural, so that the study of Bantu expansion also has been an exercise in conjectural history and in speculation. The available data are disparate and drawn from different disciplines, and the results tell us something about what can and what cannot be done in interdisciplinary research. In the telling I hope to demonstrate how much different considerations of the question have been moulded by the major themes in European and American intellectual history of the last century and how much scholarly tradition, once established, has directed and limited the solutions proposed.

The Making of American Society: An Institutional and Intellectual History of the United States

1973 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 472
Author(s):  
Wilbert H. Ahern ◽  
Richard A. Gerber ◽  
Edwin C. Rozwenc ◽  
Judith Mara Gutman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society

THE INTELLECTUAL MIGRATION AND THE “OTHER WEIMAR”

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 597-606
Author(s):  
NOAH B. STROTE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

These two books bring fresh eyes and much-needed energy to the study of the intellectual migration from Weimar Germany to the United States. Research on the scholars, writers, and artists forced to flee Europe because of their Jewish heritage or left-wing politics was once a cottage industry, but interest in this topic has waned in recent years. During the height of fascination with the émigrés, bookstores brimmed with panoramic works such as H. Stuart Hughes's The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (1975), Lewis Coser's Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (1984), and Martin Jay's Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (1985). Now, while historians still write monographs about émigré intellectuals, their focus is often narrowed to biographies of individual thinkers. Refreshingly, with Emily Levine's and Udi Greenberg's new publications we are asked to step back and recapture a broader view of their legacy. The displacement of a significant part of Germany's renowned intelligentsia to the US in the mid-twentieth century remains one of the major events in the intellectual history of both countries.

El Chamizal

1973 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip C. Jessup
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Territorial Disputes ◽  
History Of

Territorial disputes are commonplace in the history of international relations. The United States has had its share—the northeastern boundary with the British territories after the Revolutionary War, “54:40 or fight” in 1845–1846, the Alaskan boundary arbitration in 1903, and many others— including El Chamizal. This “thicket” or “brierpatch” was one in which the friendly relations between the United States and Mexico were entangled for almost a century. “The Chamizal conflict has not been a major factor in United States-Mexican relations, but has been a constant emotional irritant which has plagued both nations and had frequent reverberations throughout Latin America.”

“A Perfect Republic”: The Mosaic Constitution in Revolutionary New England, 1775–1788

2009 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eran Shalev
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New England ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Federal Constitution ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
History Of

Between the United States' declaration of independence and the country's attempt to construct a federal Constitution, a group of New England ministers proclaimed Israel's biblical history an exemplum for their republican and federal aspirations. Tracing this unique interpretive discourse, the essay underscores the importance of political Hebraism to the intellectual history of the early United States.

White Southern Memories and the Legacy of “Slave Marriage” in the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 296-324
Author(s):  
Tyler D. Parry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
Prolific Author ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wedding Ceremony

This article intersects various secondary works that analyze regional memories in the US South, slave marital practices, and the intellectual history of slavery in the United States. Following a brief analysis of the “Plantation Myth,” it examines the proslavery framework established by southern apologists in the antebellum era and gauges how postbellum authors built upon these arguments. The next part critically probes memoirists’ usage of descriptive material, scrutinizing their motivations for producing the literature, the tone conveyed through their writing, and how they used the wedding ceremony as a symbol for slavery’s benignity. Following this qualitative data, this study examines a research sample found in the collections of Herman Clarence Nixon, a prolific author in the early twentieth century who interviewed former slave owners for his research on slavery in northern Alabama. Finally, this article reveals how postbellum reminiscences portrayed a myth of gender solidarity that transcended racial boundaries.

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