U.S. Intellectual History Blog

S-USIH Member News and Notes – Fall 2012

The conference newsletter we were going to distribute in New York earlier this month (you can view/download a .pdf here) included a column of “Member News and Notes” (page 8). At my request Ray Haberski, S-USIH Secretary, had sent out an email to our membership, and I had also posted a notice on this blog, asking for professional news and publication notices from our members.  Below are the news items I received by our newsletter print deadline. 

 I would be glad to post “Member News and Notes” here on the blog in between our newsletter issues. If you are a member of the S-USIH, and you have a brief notice to share with our readers, please send me an email using the subject line “news and notes.” – L.D. Burnett
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S-USIH Member News and Notes – Fall 2012

Angus Burgin’s book, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression, was published in October by Harvard University Press.  From the HUP website:  “Just as today’s observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world.”

George Cotkin‘s newest book, Dive Deeper: Journeys With Moby Dick, was published in July by Oxford University Press. From the OUP website:  “George Cotkin’s Dive Deeper provides both a guide to the novel and a record of its dazzling cultural train. It supplies easy-to-follow plot points for each of the novel’s 135 sections before taking up a salient phrase, image, or idea in each for further exploration. Through these forays, Cotkin traces the astonishing reach of the novel, sighting the White Whale in mainstream and obscure subcultures alike, from impressionist painting circles to political terrorist cells. In a lively and engaging style, Dive Deeper immerses us into the depths of Melville’s influence on the literature, film, and art of our modern world.”

Louise (Lucy) W. Knight, Visiting Scholar, Gender Studies Program, Northwestern University, gave a plenary talk on re-interpreting Jane Addams’s ideas using a rhetorical analysis at a conference at the University of Dayton titled, “Feminist Pragmatism in Place,” October 19-20, 2012.

Drew Maciag‘s book, Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism, will be published by Cornell University Press next spring.

Mike O’Connor‘s article “Liberals in Space: The 1960s Politics of Star Trek” will be published this December in the journal The Sixties. In March of next year, Mike will be appearing as a talking head on the television series The Real Story (aired in the U.S. on the Smithsonian Channel) on the episode featuring Star Trek. Since last year’s newsletter, he has signed a contract for his book A Commercial Republic: Democratic Capitalism in American Thought. It will be published by the University Press of Kansas in early 2014.

Mark Pittinger‘s book Class Unknown:  Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present was published in August by New York University press.   From the website of the Department of History at the University of Colorado: “The book explains how social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to ‘pass’ as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor.”