It appears that David McCullough will soon produce a work of intellectual history. The book is tentatively titled The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, 1830-1900 and set to be published by Simon and Schuster in May.
According to AP, the work will be “a history of American artists and intellectuals in Paris.” A dead Publishers Weekly link from 2007 at Wikipedia—it’s relatively innocuous, so I don’t feel uncomfortable relaying it here—reports that McCullough will span “multiple topics and people…touch[ing] on achievements in literature, medicine, art, architecture, music, and dance.”
Color me intrigued. I’ll be interested to see how much, and in what ways, he engages the subfield’s historiography. And I wonder how much philosophy will make it into the book?
One Thought on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
I’ve never read anything by McCullough, but is it likely that in a book of this kind he will engage the historiography in the sense of discussing its debates? Did he do that in his other books?