The worlds of American intellectual history / edited by Joel Isaac [and three others].

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Isaac, Joel, 1978- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States--Intellectual life.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (409 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, New York : Oxford University Press, 2017.

Summary:

The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume explores ways in which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites--from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals--in which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred - some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures.The richness of contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across the Pacific to South Asia.

Contents:

Introduction: opening American thought / James T. Kloppenberg

Part I. Frames

What was the American enlightenment? / Caroline Winterer

The "woman question" in the age of democracy: from movement history to problem history / Leslie Butler

"We the people of color": colored cosmopolitanism and the borders of race / Nico Slate

Curating the Black atlantic / Jonathan Scott Holloway

Part II. Justice

The sins of slaves and the slaves of sin: toward a history of moral agency / Margaret Abruzzo

Nationalism and cosmopolitan humanity in mid-nineteenth-century American political science / Duncan Kelly

The political origins of global justice / Samuel Moyn

Part III. Philosophy

Unstiffening theory: the Italian magic pragmatists and William James / Francesca Bordogna

The longing for wisdom in twentieth-century US thought / Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Pain, analytical philosophy, and American intellectual history / Joel Isaac

On lying: writing philosophical history after the enlightenment and after Arendt / Sophia Rosenfeld

Part IV. Secularization

Science and religion in postwar America / Andrew Jewett

Religion within the bounds of democracy alone: Habermas, Rawls, and the trans-Atlantic debate over public reason / Peter E. Gordon

Christianity and its American fate: where history interrogates secularization theory / David A. Hollinger

Part V. Method

Paths in the social history of ideas / Daniel T. Rodgers

Toward a free-range intellectual history / Sarah E. Igo

New directions, then and now / Angus Burgin

Afterword / Michael O'Brien.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-19-045949-2

0-19-045948-4