News arrived this morning that the great sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall has passed away; an excellent obituary can be found at The Guardian. Although the focus of his work was, in a sense, far from U.S. intellectual history, I think it’s fair to say that his scholarship and career have nevertheless been hugely important for many U.S. intellectual historians. At the time I was in graduate school in the late 1980s, his influence in this country was being felt particularly strongly. History had taken a “cultural turn,” and English departments were focusing more and more of their attention Read more