US Intellectual History Syllabi: Angus Burgin

As I mentioned last week, Angus Burgin kindly sent me his intellectual history syllabi to help me address the question of who assigns Peter Novick, who assigns Ellen Fitzpatrick, and who assigns both authors.

Professor Burgin has kindly agreed to allow us to publish his syllabi here at the blog as the latest installment in our series of intellectual history syllabi (a series launched by my colleague Andy Seal).

So, after the jump, you will find Angus Burgin’s excellent 2014 and 2017 intellectual history syllabi, which he offers with the following crucial caveat: “they were developed to meet the needs of specific graduate students’ lists, which are developed over four semesters and multiple seminars; neither are intended to be comprehensive, and both have odd lacuna because of assignments in other semesters.”

2014

Professor: Angus Burgin ([email protected])

Office Hours: Monday 2:00pm – 3:45pm

AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Overview:

This graduate seminar explores historical works on ideas in an American context since the late nineteenth century, with an emphasis on recent developments in the field. Topics will include the development of the modern social sciences, the politics of knowledge production, and transnational exchanges of ideas.

Assignments and grading:

This is a readings seminar, and the primary expectation is that every student will arrive in class prepared to contribute to an in-depth discussion of the assigned texts.

Each student will open two of the discussion sessions by emailing the class four to six succinct questions (by 8:00pm on the Monday before the meeting) and providing five minutes of introductory remarks at the beginning of class.

At the conclusion of the semester, students are asked to submit a paper of 12-15 pages which examines a historiographic problem in greater depth. This paper should include substantial readings beyond those assigned on the syllabus, though they need not be defined around the general topics for the weekly reading assignments. It will be due on December 18.

This course will be graded on a pass/fail basis for graduate students.

Texts:

A number of the readings from the course (denoted with an * in the syllabus) will be available on electronic reserve. The other readings, listed below, can either be purchased separately or checked out on a short-term basis from Eisenhower Library reserves:

David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).
Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Cornell University Press, 2006).
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (Vintage, 1960).
Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2008).
Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard University Press, 2012).
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Harvard University Press, 1983).
James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford University Press, 1988).
J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Susan Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Harvard University Press, 2011).
David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Wednesday, September 3: Introduction

Wednesday, September 10: Time, Space, and the History of the Future

Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Harvard University Press, 1983).
*Leo Marx, “The Machine in the Garden,” New England Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1956): 27–42.
*Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 255–275.

Supplementary Readings:

Jenny Andersson, Matthew Connelly, David Engerman,and Manu Goswami, “Forum: Histories of the Future.” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012), pp. 1402–1410.
Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology: Reflections on Our Future Community (Harper & Row, 1978).
Patrick McCay, The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future (Princeton University Press, 2013).
David Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Knopf, 1977).
Vanessa Ogle, “Whose Time is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s to 1940s,” American Historical Review 120, no. 5 (2013), pp. 1376–1402.
Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America (University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2014).
Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Matthew Wisnioski, Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (MIT Press, 2012).

Wednesday, September 17: Modernism, Antimodernism, and the Practice of Cultural History

J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
*William H. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
*Daniel Wickberg, “What is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” American Historical Review (June 2007).

Supplementary Readings:

Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Robert M. Crunden, American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–1917 (Oxford University Press, 1993).
Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History (Pantheon, 1983).
Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Power of Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1993).
J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (Harper Perennial, 2010).
Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
David Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920 (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (University of Northern Press, 2002).
Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Henry Holt, 2000).

Wednesday, September 24: Pragmatism and the Atlantic Intellectual World

James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford University Press, 1988).
*Daniel T. Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (University of California Press, 2002), pp. 250–273.

Supplementary Readings:

Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
James T. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?”, Journal of American History 83 (1996), 100-138.
Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
Richard H. Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (Basic, 1997).
Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Vanderbilt University Press, 1996).
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Robert Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Mariner, 2007).
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard University Press, 1998).
Trygve Throntveit, William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic (Palgrave, 2014).
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell University Press, 1991).

Wednesday, October 1: Populism, Progressivism, and the Problems of Consensus History

Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (Vintage, 1960).
*Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, Brace, 1955), ch. 1.
*John Higham. “Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic.” American Historical Review (1962): 609-625.
*Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2009), introduction and ch. 4, 9.

Supplementary Readings:

Allen Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (Oxford University Press, 1973).
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 2011).
Eldon Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (University Press of Kansas, 1994).
Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Cornell University Press, 1993).
Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Harvard University Press, 1997).
Ann J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Pantheon, 1990).
Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: The First Years of our Own Time, 1912–1917 (Oxford University Press,1959).
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001).
Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Harper & Row, 1973).
Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1983).
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (Hill and Wang, 1967).

Wednesday, October 8: Race, Nation, and Civic Memory

David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).
*Nikhil Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2005), introduction and ch. 1.

Supplementary Readings:

Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014).
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage, 2009).
George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Harvard University Press, 1995).
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (Rutgers University Press, 2002).
David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic, 2000).
Jonathan Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998).
Walter Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Harvard University Press, 1998).
Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2011).
Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1986).

Wednesday, October 15: Rights Discourse and Categories of Difference

Susan Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
*Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Historical Ontology (Harvard University Press, 2004). 161–171.

Supplementary Readings:

Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2005).
Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2009).
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male (Basic 1995).
Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale University Press, 1987).
Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (Vintage, 1980).
Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2010).
Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (Penguin, 2000).
Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Harvard University Press, 1992).
Elaine Showalter, Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (Scribner, 2001).

Wednesday, October 22: Religion and the Dynamics of Secularization

David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2011).
*Perry Miller, “Errand Into the Wilderness” and “Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 1–15, 153–166.
*David Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton University Press, 2013), ch. 1, 2.

Supplementary Readings:

Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton, 2012).
George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2006).
George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford University Press, 1996).
George Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (Basic, 2014).
Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise (Oxford University Press, 2013).
David Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism Oxford University Press, 2013).

Wednesday, October 29: Contextualizing the Social Sciences

Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard University Press, 2012).
*Andrew Jewett, “Introduction,” Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1–19.
*Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 29–67.

Supplementary Readings:

Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (Oxford University Press, 1990).
Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1920 (Harvard University Press, 2002).
Mary Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (University Press of Kentucky, 1975).
Edward Gitre, “The Great Escape: World War II, Neo-Freudianism, and the Origins of U.S. Psychocultural Analysis,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 47 (Winter 2011), pp. 18–43.
David Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Temple University Press, 2008).
Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (University of California Press, 1995).
Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (Yale University Press, 1977).
Christopher Loss, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas (Norton, 2010).
Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1865–1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross, eds., The Modern Social Sciences, vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Edward Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973).
Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Dorothy Ross, Stanley Hall: They Psychologist as Prophet (University of Chicago Press, 1972).
Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (University of Chicago Press, 1970).

Wednesday, November 5: The Politics of Knowledge in Cold War America

Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2008).
*Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 1993), ch. 1.

Supplementary Readings:

Benjamin Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Cornell University Press, 1998).
David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Harvard University Press, 2006).
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2002).
David Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton University Press, 1996).
David Hollinger, ed., The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (University of California Press, 1991).
James Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1987).
Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (MIT Press, 1969).
Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013).
Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford University Press, 1986).
Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, 2013).
Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Wednesday, November 12: The Political Economy of the New Capitalism

Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Cornell University Press, 2006).
*Michel Foucault, lectures eight, nine, and ten in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Palgrave, 2008).

Supplementary Readings:

Michael Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2001).
Howard Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
Robert M. Collins, MORE: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2000).
John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (Norton, 1992).
Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (University of California Press, 2009).
Daniel Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
Daniel Immerwahr, “Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 445–466.
Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2007).
Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Harvard University Press, 2009).
J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (Basic, 1994).
Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Wilfred McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton University Press, 2002).
Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Harper & Row, 1985).

Wednesday, November 19: Intellectual History and International History

Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard University Press, 2014).
*David Armitage, “The International Turn in Intellectual History,” Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 232–252.

Supplementary Readings:

Thomas Bender, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (University of California Press, 2002).
David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton University Press, 2011).
David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford University Press, 2011).
David Engerman, “American Knowledge and Global Power,” Diplomatic History 31, no. 4 (September 2007), pp. 599–622.
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton University Press, 2006).
Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation-Building’ in the Kennedy Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Christopher McKnight Nichols, Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Wednesday, December 3: Market Politics and the “End of History”

Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Harvard University Press, 2011).
*Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (2008), pp. 1–32.

Supplementary Readings:

Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities Throughout American History (Yale University Press, 2009).
M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Harvard University Press, 2012).
Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009).
David Hoeveler, Jr., Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press, 2009).
George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (Basic, 1976).
Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Da Capo, 2001).
Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2008).
Daniel Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012).
Steven Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton University Press, 2008).
Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Harvard University Press, 2010).
Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (Harper, 2008).

Synthetic Texts on the History of Ideas in an American Context:

Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (Knopf, 1987).
Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (Harper & Row, 1964).
Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought, 2nd ed. (Ronald Press Company, 1956).
David Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (Knopf, 1999).
Linda Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 1998).
Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (Norton, 1991).
Lewis Perry, Intellectual Life in America (Franklin Watts, 1984).
Daniel Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (Harvard University Press, 1998).
Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1996).
Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U. S. History (Yale University Press, 1997).
Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1976).

___________________________

2017

Professor: Angus Burgin ([email protected])

Office Hours: Monday 2:00pm – 3:45pm

AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Overview:

Assignments:

This is a readings seminar, and the primary expectation is that every student will arrive in class prepared to contribute to an in-depth discussion of the assigned texts. It will be graded on a pass/fail basis for graduate students.

Texts:

Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Cornell University Press, 2006).
Sarah Bridger, Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research (Harvard University Press, 2015).
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), chs. 1, 5, 8.
Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2008).
Lawrence Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Harvard University Press, 1983).
James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford University Press, 1988).
J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Louisiana State University Press, 2013).
Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Harvard University Press, 2011).
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (Hill and Wang, 1967).
Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale University Press, 2016).
Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism Oxford University Press, 2013).

Tuesday, January 31: Special Session with François Furstenberg

Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present.

Tuesday, February 7: Intellectual Exchanges in the Age of Enlightenment

Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale University Press, 2016).
*Sophie Rosenfeld, “Introduction,” in Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard University Press, 2014).
*Arthur Lovejoy, “The Study of the History of Ideas,” in The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Harper & Brothers, 1936), pp. 3–23.
*Daniel Wickberg, “In the Environment of Ideas: Arthur Lovejoy and the History of Ideas as a Form of Cultural History,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 2 (August 2014), pp. 439–464.

Supplementary Readings:

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967).
François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (Penguin, 2014).
Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Norton, 1982).
G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. (Princeton University Press, 1975).
Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992), 11–38.
Gordon Wood, Creation of the American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 1969).
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage, 1991).

Tuesday, February 14: Slavery and Abolitionism

Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Louisiana State University Press, 2013).
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), chs. 1, 5, 8.

Supplementary Readings:

Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Cornell University Press, 1966).
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Knopf, 2014).
François Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (Penguin, 2006).
Thomas Haskell, Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, parts I and II, American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (1985).
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (W. W. Norton, 2003).
Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016).
Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Tuesday, February 21: Time, Space, and the History of the Future

Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Harvard University Press, 1983).
*Leo Marx, “The Machine in the Garden,” New England Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1956): 27–42.
*Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 255–275.

Supplementary Readings:

Jenny Andersson, Matthew Connelly, David Engerman,and Manu Goswami, “Forum: Histories of the Future.” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012), pp. 1402–1410.
Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology: Reflections on Our Future Community (Harper & Row, 1978).
Patrick McCay, The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future (Princeton University Press, 2013).
David Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Knopf, 1977).
Vanessa Ogle, “Whose Time is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s to 1940s,” American Historical Review 120, no. 5 (2013), pp. 1376–1402.
Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America (University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2014).
Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Matthew Wisnioski, Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (MIT Press, 2012).

Tuesday, February 28: Modernism, Antimodernism, and the Practice of Cultural History

J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
*William H. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Supplementary Readings:

Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Robert M. Crunden, American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–1917 (Oxford University Press, 1993).
Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History (Pantheon, 1983).
Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Power of Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1993).
J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (Harper Perennial, 2010).
Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
David Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920 (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (University of Northern Press, 2002).
Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Henry Holt, 2000).

Tuesday, March 7: In Search of Progressivism

Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: The First Years of our Own Time, 1912–1917 (Oxford University Press,1959).
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (Hill and Wang, 1967).
*Daniel Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (1982), pp. 113–132.

Supplementary Readings:

Allen Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (Oxford University Press, 1973).
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 2011).
Eldon Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (University Press of Kansas, 1994).
Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Cornell University Press, 1993).
Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Harvard University Press, 1997).
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, Brace, 1955).
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (Vintage, 1960).
Ann J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Pantheon, 1990).
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001).
L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: The Beginnings of Critical Realism (Harcourt, Brace, 1939).
Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Harper & Row, 1973).
Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard University Press, 1998).
John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1983).

Tuesday, March 15: Pragmatisms Old and New

Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (Beacon, 1947).
James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), preface and part 2.
*James T. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?”, Journal of American History 83 (1996), 100-138.

Supplementary Readings:

Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford University Press, 1988).
Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
Richard H. Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (Basic, 1997).
Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Vanderbilt University Press, 1996).
Edward Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973).
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Robert Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Mariner, 2007).
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard University Press, 1998).
Trygve Throntveit, William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic (Palgrave, 2014).
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell University Press, 1991).

Tuesday, March 28: The Midcentury Politics of Color and Culture

Lawrence Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton University Press, 2011).
*Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Harvard University Press, 1998), ch. 1, ch. 6.

Supplementary Readings:

Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014).
George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Harvard University Press, 1995).
David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic, 2000).
Jonathan Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Walter Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2011).
Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1986).

Tuesday, April 4: Knowledge Production in Cold War America

Sarah Bridger, Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research (Harvard University Press, 2015).
*Joel Isaac, “Tool Shock: Technique and Epistemology in the Postwar Social Sciences,” History of Political Economy 42, supplement, pp. 133–164.
*Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 29–67.

Supplementary Readings:

Benjamin Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Cornell University Press, 1998).
David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Harvard University Press, 2006).
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2002).
David Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton University Press, 1996).
David Hollinger, ed., The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (University of California Press, 1991).
James Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1987).
Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (MIT Press, 1969).
Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013).
Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford University Press, 1986).
Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, 2013).
Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Tuesday, April 11: The Political Economy of the New Capitalism

Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Cornell University Press, 2006).
*Wilfred McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), introduction and chs. 7, 8.

Supplementary Readings:

Michael Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2001).
Howard Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
Robert M. Collins, MORE: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2000).
John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (Norton, 1992).
Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (University of California Press, 2009).
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Palgrave, 2008).
Daniel Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
Daniel Immerwahr, “Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 445–466.
Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2007).
Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Harvard University Press, 2009).
J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (Basic, 1994).
Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton University Press, 2002).
Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Harper & Row, 1985).

Tuesday, April 18: Religion and the Dynamics of Secularization

Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism Oxford University Press, 2013).
*Perry Miller, “Errand Into the Wilderness” and “Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 1–15, 153–166.
*David Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton University Press, 2013), ch. 1, 2.

Supplementary Readings:

Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton, 2012).
George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2006).
George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford University Press, 1996).
George Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (Basic, 2014).
Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise (Oxford University Press, 2013).
David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2011).
David Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

Tuesday, April 25: The Public Life of the Social Sciences

Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2008).
*Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 1993), ch. 1.
*Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Historical Ontology (Harvard University Press, 2004). 161–171.

Supplementary Readings:

Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (Oxford University Press, 1994).
Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1920 (Harvard University Press, 2002).
Mary Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (University Press of Kentucky, 1975).
Edward Gitre, “The Great Escape: World War II, Neo-Freudianism, and the Origins of U.S. Psychocultural Analysis,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 47 (Winter 2011), pp. 18–43.
David Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Temple University Press, 2008).
Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (University of California Press, 1995).
Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard University Press, 2012).
Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (Yale University Press, 1977).
Christopher Loss, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas (Norton, 2010).
Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1865–1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross, eds., The Modern Social Sciences, vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Dorothy Ross, Stanley Hall: They Psychologist as Prophet (University of Chicago Press, 1972).
Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (University of Chicago Press, 1970).

Tuesday, May 2: Marketplace Society and the “End of History”

Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Harvard University Press, 2011).
*Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (2008), pp. 1–32.

Supplementary Readings:

Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities Throughout American History (Yale University Press, 2009).
M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Harvard University Press, 2012).
Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009).
David Hoeveler, Jr., Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press, 2009).
George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (Basic, 1976).
Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Da Capo, 2001).
Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2008).
Daniel Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012).
Steven Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton University Press, 2008).
Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Harvard University Press, 2010).
Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (Harper, 2008).

Synthetic Texts on the History of Ideas in an American Context:

Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (Knopf, 1987).
Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (Harper & Row, 1964).
Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought, 2nd ed. (Ronald Press Company, 1956).
David Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (Knopf, 1999).
Linda Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 1998).
Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (Norton, 1991).
Lewis Perry, Intellectual Life in America (Franklin Watts, 1984).
Daniel Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (Harvard University Press, 1998).
Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1996).
Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U. S. History (Yale University Press, 1997).
Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1976).

6 Thoughts 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.

richard king says:

April 9, 2017 at 10:55 am

Thanks to Angus Burgin for sharing his Intellectual History syllabus with us. It is an impressive document that makes me realize how much I don’t know, i.e. how far behind I am. But it also gives me a chance to make a few abbreviated comments that reflect the thoughts on these matters that have been turning over in my mind,since I have been following the S-USIH blog postings. My reflections focus on what I see as several biases in the bibliography that we might consider when we think about what we should be teaching our students and what we should know as teachers and scholars.
First, the list is very oriented toward professional historians and their work. This may be as it should be, but I doubt it. Or not at least to and by them alone. We should remember that Arthur Lovejoy and Morton White were philosophers, while Vernon Parrington, Louis Menand and Morris Dickstein were/are literary scholars and critics. Shouldn’t we be more open to literature and philosophy as sources of thinking and writing we can learn from. There is also the minimal attention we all pay to science, high and popular, and writing about it. Thomas Kuhn is perfectly accessible to intellectual historians who are interested in philosophy and history of science.
Second, Angus Burgin’s list is also very much US oriented. Again this may be logical and necessary–and he does have a session on transatlantic/transnational and comparative work. Besides recent work on Weber, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Arendt, and Nabakov and leaving Tocqueville aside, Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic” and other of his essays are deeply felt and thought through reflections on his own visit to America in the early part of the 20th Century. Was CLR James a West Indian or American intellectual and what difference does that make? Since I live in the UK, it is difficult to know whether Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” idea has come and gone or just never arrived in America. Still, I am surprised at how African American thought still is confined largely to North American thinkers and themes and the black Atlantic as a cultural/intellectual region still needs attention, not just from literary scholars and artists.
Finally, if the S-USIH blog and Angus Burgin’s course syllabus are any indication, US intellectual historians concern themselves mainly with three sorts of writing–historiography, interpretive monographs, and individual/group thinkers. What worries me in all this is how people seem to want to read interpretive work on the Gilded Age rather than work on Veblen’s thought directly. Why not assign Veblen or Darwin, for that matter? All of us continually generalize about the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal tradition but actually assigning John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, or Richard Rorty seems relatively rare. Where would students go to learn about the deep intellectual background to Carol Gilligan’s work? Would they have to go to the psychology department? What sort of course might a graduate history program offer where such an issue could be taken up? Harold Cruse’s “Crisis of the Negro Intellectual” was baffling when I first read, but it, like Gilligan, has an intellectual genealogy that is just as important as the immediate context of the 1960s. Finally, though I have no use for the politics commonly associated with the Straussians, Strauss and his followers have been right, I think, to insist we read primary sources, the thinkers and writers themselves, before reaching for the interpretive studies of them to find out what they were really saying.
Best,
Richard King
L.D. Burnett says:

April 9, 2017 at 12:57 pm

Prof. King, thanks for your comment.

We would love to run a series of guest posts from you tackling some of the thinkers and writers that you think should receive more focused attention, and/or modeling the kind of approach that you’d like to see in our public-facing writing here at the blog. Just say the word — we would be glad to publish any posts you could send us over the course of a few weeks, and I know our readers would be glad to read them and engage with you in the comments.
- to L.D. Burnett
  Andrew Hartman says:
  
  April 10, 2017 at 8:07 am
  
  I for one would love to read such a series by Richard King.
Louis says:

April 10, 2017 at 2:53 pm

Re Richard King’s interesting comment: I assume (?) that the presumption is that grad students will have encountered primary sources, esp. in their areas of interest, in other contexts.

To take one small example, it would be weird, to put it no more strongly, if someone interested in the intellectual roots of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War had read a book about Kennan, or a critical survey like Kuklick’s Blind Oracles, but had not read Kennan’s “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (the so-called X-article).
L.D. Burnett says:

April 10, 2017 at 5:22 pm

My assumption (and experience) is that grad students read lots and lots (and lots) of primary sources for field exams, and certainly engage them in research and writing. And, depending on the aim/framing of the seminar, a syllabus might be more heavily weighted to primary sources. I think the “American Intellectual History” syllabuses we’ve featured here so far are covering not just “content” but also “approach” — they are implicitly seminars in historiography, in how to write/frame/do American intellectual history. So I’d expect them to be heavy in secondary sources. And it sounds like in Burgin’s case, the seminar syllabus is framed to give students more secondary reading in the areas they’re already doing primary research in.
richard king says:

April 10, 2017 at 6:39 pm

Thanks to both Louis and LD Burnett whose points are well taken. There are all sorts of ways to work out reading for an actual seminar. But in principle, I think it is necessary in intellectual history to keep texts/primary sources central, with secondary sources meant to aid in their understanding. All the debates–isolationism, realism v. idealism, and the like–are undergirded by intellectual histories of their own, as I’m sure readers will know. So, I would envisage a class where not just “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” was read(and there are several versions of it), but also parts of Kennan’s memoirs and also books like “Russia and the West.” Along with that, the Kennan biographies, as well as the interpretive studies, should be read along with the primary material. Incidentally, my own impression is that there has been an increase in work on the rule of ideas and cultural forces in studies of foreign policy and diplomatic history. I’m thinking here of the work of Andrew Preston and David Milne in the UK. Finally, I am also aware that Angus Burgin’s syllabus did not come into being in a vacuum and that it represents only part of the story.
Thanks, Richard

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