American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction

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.

7. The opening of the American mind

‘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.”

Introduction

‘Introduction’ examines the scope and aims of American intellectual history. It shows how it is an approach to understanding the American past by way of ideas and the people who made or were moved by them. Intellectual history seeks to understand where certain persistent concerns in American thought have come from and why some ideas, which were important in the past, have faded from view. Intellectual history also concerns itself with the myriad institutions that are sites of intellectual production and dissemination. Ultimately, intellectual history invites thinking about thinking, both in the past and today. It seeks to demonstrate that thinking is where so much of the historical action is.

1. World of empires

‘World of empires’ examines the emergence of America—both as an idea and as a lived reality—from the sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries. The discovery of America had dramatic intellectual consequences not only for those explorers and settlers who traveled to the New World, but also for European thought more broadly. The transplanted Europeans were as different from each other as they were from the many tribes of indigenous people they encountered. Thus, wrestling with the diversity of people, ways of life, and worldviews became the main feature of early American thought.

4. Contests of intellectual authority

‘Contests of intellectual authority’ examines the clash of ideas and ideologies that shaped America in the years leading up to the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century. It opens with two historical events of 1859 that altered the course of American thought: John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The moral challenges raised by race-based slavery and evolutionary theory shaped American notions of freedom, divine providence, and human responsibility. While the Civil War ultimately resolved a political and legal dispute, it did not resolve larger intellectual, religious, and moral ones. These contests of moral authority and the range of human responses to human problems are on full display in late nineteenth-century American life.

8. Against universalism

‘Against universalism’ explores the myriad challenges to universalism—in philosophy, social and political theory, and the arts—during the late twentieth century. It opens with a new view of 1960s radicalism, showing how its various quests for liberation radiated out into all arenas of American thought. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) helped pave the way for the fire and fury of postmodernism, though many of the antiessentialist ideas of postmodernism were already present in early twentieth-century was rooting in dramatic transformations of thought. The 1980s and 1990s gave rise to identity politics and the culture wars, further challenging the notion of unified American ideals and identity.

“An Inside Thing to Live by”: Refusal, Conjure, and Black Feminist Imaginaries among Granny Midwives

“Granny midwives” often based their authority to practice midwifery on the spiritual traditions of rootwork or conjure passed down by the foremothers who trained them. However, granny midwives were compelled to give up their conjure-infused methods of birthing if they wanted to become licensed (that is, to get a “permit”) or be authorized by the state to continue their practice of midwifery. In response, some granny midwives refused to recognize the authority of the state in the birthing realm, willfully retaining rootwork in their birthing practices. In this article, I contrast the response of granny midwives, a politics of refusal, with another major tradition in African American thought, a politics of recognition, such as gaining citizenship and rights, permits, and licenses from the state. Due to the political stakes of the granny midwife's conflict with the state, I argue that black feminists often endow the figure of the granny midwife (or more broadly, the conjure woman) with the political significance of refusal in our emancipatory imaginaries. To demonstrate this, I will analyze the interventions in black liberation politics that two black feminist writers make through their invocation of granny midwives: Zora Neale Hurston's essay, “High John de Conquer,” and Toni Morrison's novel, Paradise.