Why I Chose Intellectual History

Why I Chose Intellectual History

by Robert Greene II

[Editor's note:  the following is a guest post by Robert Greene II.  Robert is a doctoral student at the University of South Carolina. His  areas of study include memory, American political history, intellectual history, and the American South in the Twentieth Century.]

My name is Robert Greene II, and I’m working on a PhD in history at the University of South Carolina. My interests over the years have taken several twists and turns, which I know is par for the course for many historians. When I began my Master’s program at Georgia Southern University in 2008 (which seems like a lifetime ago now), I first identified myself as an historian of the Reconstruction era. After a semester which included a course on working class history, though, I found myself intrigued with the Populists. My introduction to this group of Americans, struggling to deal with America’s transition to an industrialized society, was eye opening. In particular I could not help but think about Americans in the present day, dealing with economic, cultural, and social upheavals.

Now I’m in no way comparing, say, the Tea Party to the Populists of the 1890s. But I will say that researching the secondary literature on the Populists strengthened an element of historical learning that had first awakened in me when I read W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction as an undergraduate. The writing of history often cannot be divorced from the moment in which a historian is writing. This is no shock to any historian in any level of higher education, but reading the different interpretations of Populists from Richard Hofstadter to Lawrence Goodwyn to Charles Postel (and many, many historians in between) encouraged me not only to think about how history is written, but to think about the intellectual climate in which these various historians were writing. (more…)