7. The opening of the American mind

2021 ◽  
pp. 95-109
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Think Tanks ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
American Mind ◽  
American Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Intellectual Movements ◽  
American Thought

‘The opening of the American mind’ challenges the perception of postwar American intellectual life as a period of staid traditionalism, stifling uniformity, complacency, and consensus. While some aspects of the 1950s and early 1960s Cold War culture were intellectually suffocating, others helped to widen Americans’ intellectual horizons. America’s new status as a global superpower stimulated the development of its intellectual and cultural institutions at a pace unprecedented in its history. The dramatic expansion of higher education, think tanks, and the print culture marketplace contributed to the opening of mid-century American thought. Varieties of existentialism, the creation of a lively conservative tradition, and the growing American interest in intellectual movements and spiritual practices from around the world helped Americans “breathe a larger air.”

The Protestant Enlightenment Revisited: Daniel Coit Gilman and the Academic Reforms of the Modern American University

1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-703
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Graduate Education ◽  
Research Universities ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
American University ◽  
Civic Leaders ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Contemporary Practice ◽  
The University

An exchange took place at the end of the nineteenth century between William Rainey Harper and Dwight L. Moody that makes little sense to those who study American intellectual life at the end of the twentieth. What is remarkable about this incident is not that Harper, the president of the University of Chicago, a new institution dedicated to promoting science, advanced research and graduate education, invited Moody, the leading revivalist of the Gilded Age, to speak at one of America's most promising new universities. To be sure, our understanding of the educational reforms associated with the founding of research universities rarely encompasses the transatlantic revivals of Moody and his song leader, Ira Sankey. And Harper's invitation to Moody could reasonably be compared to the contemporary practice of conferring honorary degrees on civic leaders and celebrities not known for their interest in higher education but whose reputation could well benefit the degree-granting institution. What is exceptional in this exchange is Harper's assessment of the similarities between his university and Moody's revivals. While Harper acknowledged the use of different means, he thought his and Moody's aims were the same. ‘I do not understand’, Harper wrote, ‘that you, as a matter of fact, represent any other position than that which is actually maintained here at the University. The differences between us are merely differences of detail.’

Revivals and Revolution: Historiographic Turns since Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 695-721 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Goff
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
American Mind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Intellectual Movements ◽  
American Thought ◽  
Recent Interpretation ◽  
The Revolution

Thirty years ago Alan Heimert published his monumental study of religion's relationship to the American Revolution. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution contradicted the conventional wisdom rooted in Vernon Parrington's 1927 Main Currents of American Thought and implicitly challenged the more recent interpretation put forward by Heimert's own mentor, Perry Miller. Critics responded vigorously, but their reproofs did not foretell the future of Heimert's argument. Indeed, in the past twenty years a cadreof young scholars assumed either his thesis or method and moved the debate toward the personalities and movements Heimert underscored. Some of today's leading scholars who study connections between the revivals and the Revolution pay homage to Heimert's thought in footnotes if not in the texts themselves. Two social/intellectual movements seemingly at cross-purposes, namely Protestant evangelicalism and the new cultural history, rescued Heimert's work from scathing yet well-placed criticisms to establish its assertions as a leading model for understanding religion's role in the American Revolution.

Social Glocalisation and Education

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hobelsberger
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Practical Theology ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Local Effects ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Work Health

This book discusses the local effects of globalisation, especially in the context of social work, health and practical theology, as well as the challenges of higher education in a troubled world. The more globalised the world becomes, the more important local identities are. The global becomes effective in the local sphere. This phenomenon, called ‘glocalisation’ since the 1990s, poses many challenges to people and to the social structures in which they operate.

Educational Entrepreneurs in Tamil Nadu - A Profile

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Siluvai Raja
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
World Bank ◽  
Education System ◽  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World

Education has been considered as an indispensable asset of every individual, community and nation today. Indias higher education system is the third largest in the world, after China and the United States (World Bank). Tamil Nadu occupies the first place in terms of possession of higher educational institutions in the private sector in the country with over 46 percent(27) universities, 94 percent(464) professional colleges and 65 percent(383) arts and science colleges(2011). Studies to understand the profile of the entrepreneurs providing higher education either in India or Tamil Nadu were hardly available. This paper attempts to map the demographic profile of the entrepreneurs providing higher education in Arts and Science colleges in Tamil Nadu through an empirical analysis, carried out among 25 entrepreneurs spread across the state. This paper presents a summary of major inferences of the analysis.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Kotzmann
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Educational Disadvantage ◽  
The World ◽  
Higher Education Teaching

The Introduction highlights the importance of higher education and the existence of educational disadvantage in society, contextualised within current political events and discussions. It describes the intrinsic importance of education in allowing people to learn about themselves and the world they live in. It details the significant instrumental importance of education in the likelihood people will obtain employment and command higher incomes. It also provides a brief outline of different historical perspectives in relation to how best to provide higher education teaching and learning. The importance of law and policy for higher education is discussed, and the purpose and limitations of the research identified.

Textbook Popery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Public School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Female Teachers ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
School Movement

By the 1840s, convent narratives gained more middle-class, respectable readers, moving away from descriptions of sex and sadism and focusing instead on convent schools and the education of young women. Popular works such as Protestant Girl in a French Nunnery described "tricks" used by nuns to convert female pupils and lure them into convents. Such literature warned that as neither wives nor mothers, nuns could not train the right kind of women for America. The focus on convent schools converged with the common or public school movement. At the same time, teaching became an acceptable occupation for women, prompting more women to seek opportunities for higher education. This chapter compares the approach to education among nuns and other female teachers alongside the caricatures of convent schools in anti-Catholic print culture. I seek to answer why convent schools faced such heightened animosity even as teaching became feminized.

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