Intellectual history is featured in this thoughtful roundtable now out in the Journal of the Early Republic, VOLUME 43, NUMBER 4 (WINTER 2023).
The S-USIH blog welcomes additional responses to the forum. Email Katherine Jewell ([email protected]) with proposed responses.
Amy Kittelstrom introduces the forum, a series five articles. Kittelstrom explains “how current scholarship diverges from or corrects the conventional narrative that has centered elite Anglo-Protestant intellectuals from the beginning of the discipline until recently.” New currents in the field have redefined core disciplinary terms and concepts, leaving behind “American exceptionalism, a progressive view of American history, the notion of a collective American mind, and the acceptance of intellectual authority or elite status as indicative of historical value.” Scholars embracing “Indigenous, African American, Catholic, Mexican-American, and Californiana voices reveal American thinkers who were skeptical of Anglo-Protestant premises, had perspectives worth considering, and made contributions to the history of American thought even while historians ignored them.”
Despite these monumental revisions, Kittelstrom points out the dangers posed by the deterioration of support for scholarship as contingency grips higher education.
The essays that follow demonstrate the vibrancy of the field, and can be perused in depth in the issue.
David Martínez
A City Upon Stolen Land: Westward Expansion, Indigenous Intellectuals, and the Origin of Resistance
During the first century of American Indian intellectual history, two points of view developed to define this unique community. First, as Indigenous people, each writer represented was concerned about a particular nation, usually their own, e.g. Boudinot and the Cherokee, Apess and the Marshpee. Moreover, they wanted the whites to see their faces, as Cherokee or Marshpee, as opposed to merely “Indians,” which were despised in the white imagination. Secondly, as Indigenous Christians, some, like Copway, were ministers, they evoked their version of the Brotherhood of Man idea as a way of getting whites to see Indigenous people as fellow human beings and as rightful citizens of the U.S. In the end, as Vine Deloria J.r once stated stated publicly: “All we’ve ever wanted from Christians is for them to behave like Christians.”
Mia Bay
The Revolution in Black and White
The American Revolution in Black and White compares Black and white responses to the American colonists’ struggle for freedom from British domination. Focused on colonists who rallied in support of independence, it contends that although Americans on both sides of the color line mobilized around natural rights ideology, Black and white patriots were far too divided by race and class to understand the revolutionary rhetoric they embraced the same way. While Jefferson and other slave-holding patriot leaders saw declaring independence as a natter of state-making, Black patriots such as New Englander Lemuel Haynes pushed for a more expansive understanding of the colonist’s struggle for political freedom, and read the Declaration of Independence as a liberty-making document.
Richard Newman
Early Black Thought Leaders and the Reframing of American Intellectual History
This essay examines the broad impact of African American thought leadership on early American intellectual history. Though marginalized in many mainstream histories of American intellectual life–which often focus on the emergence of Black philosophers and Black professional historians later in the 19th century — early national Black thinkers helped shape public understanding of critical ideas in American society and politics, including the meaning of citizenship and civil rights, emancipation and equality, and racial justice. African Americans also influenced public discourses on other key topics in American intellectual life, including the nature of human dignity and spiritual redemption in the Second Great Awakening, the meaning of Romanticism and Transcendentalism in American reform culture, and the authority of science and technology in antebellum society. Using the concept of thought leadership as a framing device to understand the power and impact of early Black ideas, I follow recent trends in the field of African American intellectual history that focus on that way that African American men and women became public authorities on key ideas and issues in American culture between the American Revolution and Civil War. Though they did not often occupy positions of educational, institutional, or legal power (the main provinces of intellectual leadership), Black thought leaders had a significant impact on early American intellectual history.
Jeffrey R. Appelhans
Something New Under the Sun: The Catholic Counterpoint in Early America
This article responds to the provocation: what happens if we put minority traditions of thought and ideology—in this case, more specifically Catholics—into the narrative of early America? This article hints at the alternative to our textbooks and lectures: a strange and unexpected inclusion of early American Catholics during a kind of golden era initiated by imperial conflict in the early 1770s which ran to the 1840s. As historians revise broad histories of exclusion and marginalization in early American civil and intellectual life, it points to a Catholic counterpoint—and Catholic ascendence—one that was extant before the Revolution and extended deep into the antebellum era.
Erika Pérez
Voices from California: Spanish–Mexican and Indigenous Women’s Interventions on Empire and Manifest Destiny
This article examines California Spanish-Mexican and Indigenous women’s counternarratives and critiques of U.S. geopolitical conquest in the former Catholic Spanish and Mexican northwest. California women’s testimonios (oral accounts) and written observations in the nineteenth century repudiated the notion that the West under Spanish and Mexican rule had not already undergone imperial projects of cultural civilization and political progress. They questioned the validity of Anglo assertions of cultural superiority, honor, and progress. While their testimonies reveal parallels between Anglo and Spanish-Mexican aims in colonizing California, these women offer unique perspectives of geopolitical conquest in the age of Manifest Destiny and U.S. imperialism. Furthermore, their accounts directly challenge Anglo American women’s hagiographies of U.S. military men’s exploits in California.
0