Not only our major “state of the field” essays on this blog, including particularly the fine guest posts by Daniel Wickberg and, more recently, Angus Burgin, but also the “state of the field” forums those two guest essays discuss, all alike acknowledge and contend with the continued importance of the 1977 Wingspread Conference on New Directions in American Intellectual History. To even mention “Wingspread” is to gesture toward one of the most significant developments in the historiography of our subdiscipline. Wingspread is one of those things that Every U.S. Intellectual Historian Needs to Know – or at least know about. Read more