Thanks for a Great Conversation!

We want to thank L. D. Burnett for organizing this series of commentaries, and we want to thank all of the colleagues who posted. Lots of the posts show the vitality and dynamism of the field. Colleagues are engaging important issues, and it has been fun for us to follow the conversation. Without wanting to devalue any colleague, we do want express special appreciation to L.D. and to Ben Alpers, who have posted frequently and who have put lots of thought and energy into their comments. This series has been of interest to us not only in thinking through yet again what ought to appear in a Source Book, but in pondering how a number of texts could be taught.

Dividing up AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION into thematic-chronological sections was not something we wanted to do, but Oxford and some of our correspondents were insistent. Our own preference would be a simple chronological presentation of the texts, all the way through, leaving it to each instructor to decide what thematic emphasis to provide. Indeed, the section introductions and are the parts of AIT that we feel we can least effectively defend. By contrast, we put a lot of energy into the headnotes for each selection, believing that we could help instructors with bibliographical suggestions and a brief framing of the historical setting of each piece of writing. Perhaps we should have stood down our publisher on this, but we gave in, with the result that the richness of the history of American thought is too often reduced to clichéd themes, and we appear to be trying to impose a narrower framework for the field than we are comfortable with. Sorry! The frustrations voiced by several posts are on target.

One thing about this series of posts hits us right away. There are 19 postings in relation to volume one, and 7 in relation to volume two. Moreover, the comments inspired by volume two are heavily concerned with the contents as such; should there be a selection from so-and-so who is not here, and what might easily be cut? There is some of that in relation to volume one, also, but the posts there are more often meditations on the material in the Source Book.

This is a reminder of one of the main points David made in his article of 2012 in MODERN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY (Volume IX, pp. 185-200).  Colleagues are ready to jump right into discussions of Edwards and Emerson and Jefferson, but they do not agree at all about what students most need to read from the period since 1930, and especially since 1970. Hence colleagues more often argue about what is to be included as opposed to what’s interesting about what is.

That pattern reveals a paradox. Colleagues are the most confident in the correctness of their opinions on issues where professional consensus is the most lacking! Some accept diversity of collegial opinion, but in dealing with the recent period our correspondents are more likely to be impatient with disagreement. We have dealt as best we can with this reality, and anyone who looks over the tables of contents of our seven editions will see how we have tried to serve many different priorities. Since L. D. has commented on the 1970s we want to say that our attention has been to ideas and texts that defined the terms of discourse over fairly long periods, and we found that texts appearing in the 1960s dominated discussions during the 1970s. We did not find as many new 1970s texts having as much enduring influence as those 1960s texts. We have not tried to do justice to the creativity of each decade on its own terms. This may have been a mistake? In any case, it has been our judgement that the 1960-1967 span of years is one of the most creative in all of American intellectual history, and that the texts published during those years have shown an astonishing capacity to shape later debates. Also, we have been acutely aware that students do not need a history course to provide access to recent and contemporary issues. There, what intellectual history has to offer is surely more modest than what can be offered by political science, sociology, and journalism.

It would not do here to repeat the other points David made in that 2012 piece, but we remind colleagues that in those pages one can find an explanation of the conception of the SOURCE BOOK, and emphasis on the special role played in it by the conviction that a basic theme of American intellectual history is the accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment. There, too, David explains that while in many subfields contention has focused on race, class, and gender, much more prominent in our correspondence about AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION have been contentions about philosophy and literature. Many colleagues want less of both. Others want them retained. This is a major point of disagreement in the field right now. That article recounts the process by which we revised each edition, and specifies many of the texts that were suggested, adopted, put aside, etc., and something of the reasoning behind it all. Judging from some of the posts here, colleagues who have not read that article will find in it answers some of their questions about why some things got in, and others not. We do listen. But we can’t please everyone!

Concerning those decisions, we have been more concerned with how discursive power has actually been exercised than with how we might wish it had been. But not entirely. Sometimes the scholars in the field show a strong desire to recognize the intellectual creativity of this or that neglected thinker, especially if it clear that the individual was kept out the action by the prejudices of empowered white males. In those cases, a text that did not become a major referent point in its own time becomes important for ours. Yet for the most part we have focused on what were prominent referent points in the most sophisticated discourse of a generation, whether we like it or not. And often, we don’t like it! A history anthology is profoundly different from an anthology in literature or philosophy. In those fields, what matters is the literary or philosophical merit of a given text as judged by contemporary standards.  Hence Sinclair Lewis is now absolutely nowhere in American Literature courses, but remains a giant in American intellectual history. Philosophers don’t read Jonathan Edwards now, but no historical consideration of American philosophy could do without him. A loose analogy within the discipline of history may help here. Historical accounts of World War II have sometimes been written on the basis of how we wish military power had been exercised, rather than how it actually was. So, the Nazis were defeated almost entirely by the Americans. No. In fact, the Soviet armies were absolutely central to the process. To diminish the role of the Red Army in order to inflate the impact of people with whom we more easily identify is not good history.

It is important to remember how easy it now is for instructors to supplement the Source Book with other readings. We do this ourselves in our own teaching. Charlie (who teaches both semesters, pre-1865 and post-1865) has often assigned novels, most often BLITHDALE ROMANCE, UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, SISTER CARRIE, and INVISBLE MAN. He often does films, too, most often Griffith’s INTOLERANCE, Dorfman’s ARGUING WITH THE WORLD, Mate’s DOA, Capra’s MEET JOHN DOE, and Ray’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. David (who has only taught a post-1865 course) often assigned a number of poems (most often, “Village Blacksmith,” “White Man’s Burden,” and “In Memory of William Butler Yeats”) and novels (most often HUCK FINN, DAMNATION OF THERON WARE, GREAT GATSBY, and ALL THE KING’S MEN). We know from our correspondents how frequent this practice is, and also the other side of the process: some instructors will not assign this or that selection in the Source Book. This is especially relevant to the point made about recent history. We know that many instructors will copy sections from an earlier edition and use them in preference to the selections that replaced those favorite texts in a later edition.

Indeed, electronic technologies now make it so easy to develop an independent syllabus that the relative role of any book of sources is probably diminished. Colleagues are less dependent upon AMERICAN INTELELCTUAL TRADITION as they work up their own syllabi. Apparently, our SOURCE BOOK helps a great many colleagues. We are glad to be reassured about this. There would be no point to it colleagues did not make use of it. Thanks again, from both of us, for this detailed and informative engagement.