20th century | Society for US Intellectual History

How to Think about Robert Caro

The official website of Robert A. Caro isn’t shy about quoting the Sunday Times (UK), which calls him “the greatest political biographer of the modern era.” Even as readers await the fifth volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the claim cries out for perspective and comparison.Admittedly no such incontestable primacy is possible for any biographer. The criteria are too debatable and the unlikelihood of a single biographer atop Olympus too obvious. Yet the case for Caro looks strong. Read more

Drew Maciag

May 29, 2024

Still Dangling After All These Years

I won’t claim it’s a great book, but Saul Bellow’s debut novel, Dangling Man (1944), made quite an impression when I first read it over forty years ago. Although Bellow Read more

Andrew Jewett

March 19, 2024

The History of Academic Departments–Call for Respondents

The History of Academic DepartmentsAs part of an effort to bring attention to the history of academic departments and to develop the subject as a distinct area of historical inquiry, Read more

L. Benjamin Rolsky

February 6, 2024

Why the Study of the Right is Broken, Part I

In the summer of 1981, the New Left Review published a special issue titled, “The Anatomy of Reaganism.” Featuring the writings of prominent sociologists and political theorists including Alan Wolfe Read more

Drew Maciag

January 30, 2024

The American Dream: Is That All There Is? Is That All There Was?

I always get a bit queasy over the catchphrase “the American Dream.” I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard (or read) variations on: “All he wants is his Read more

Two books stacked one on top of the other: King, A Life by Jonathan Eig and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Anthony Chaney

September 4, 2023

King, A Life and Blood Meridian: Reading under the Heat Dome

By September 1st in Dallas, Texas, we’d been living under a heat dome for two and half months. The days during which it was actually pleasant to be outside could Read more

Zachary Jacobson

August 23, 2023

A Still Fetid Field?

In his 1941 essay titled “Sensibility and History,” the historian Lucien Febvre lamented what he saw as scholars’ singular focus on the rational, reason and the intellectual. As fascism threatened Read more