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The American Mind Is Dead, Long Live the American Mind

Review products

Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2018)
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)
Daniel T. Rodgers, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2020

Amy Kittelstrom
Amy Kittelstrom*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Sonoma State University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: akittelstrom@gmail.com
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Extract

The story of American intellectual history has a mythic quality: a slow beginning, a rise to great heights, and a precipitous fall. Early in the twentieth century, the study of American history and literature grew in American colleges and universities, after many years of teaching European ideas in lieu of an American canon. Then, from a literature department arose Vernon Louis Parrington and from an American studies department Perry Miller—their writing compelling, learned, and suggestive. Their books and their students established the new field of American intellectual history, drawing readers far and wide into their interpretations of how not just individuals but entire peoples had “minds” that hovered above society, transmitting ideas from the past and changing with the times. Miller pioneered this approach with The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, which became required reading for historians for decades—and ever since, for Puritan specialists. Miller used the published sermons of the most prominent theologians—and their European sources—to describe a crisis in Puritan thought over the character of their faith and therefore purpose. The concept of the regional or national mind became so popular that when Parrington's student Henry Steele Commager published The American Mind at mid-century, the book met a hungry public and went into eight printings in seven years.

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Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 865 - 876
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

†

The original version of this article was published with an erroneous footnote and supporting clause. A notice detailing this has been published and the error rectified in the PDF and HTML copies.

References

1 The first place to go for understanding the fall of American intellectual history from academic grace is Higham, John and Conklin, Paul K., eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979)Google Scholar. To get a sense of where the field has gone since then see Wickberg, Daniel, “Intellectual History vs. the Social History of Intellectuals,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 5/3 (2001), 383–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Angus Burgin, “New Directions, Then and Now,” in Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, eds., Worlds of American Intellectual History (New York), 343–64; Bender, Thomas, “Forty Years from Wingspread: The Transformation of American Intellectual History,” Modern Intellectual History 16/2 (2019), 633–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1939)Google Scholar.

3 Commager, Henry Steele, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880's (New Haven, 1950)Google Scholar. Under the copyright: “Eighth printing August 1957.”

4 Matthews, Fred, “Thinking Small: An Intellectual History to Fit the New Social History,” Reviews in American History 13/3 (1985), 330–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 330.

5 Kloppenberg, James T., Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York, 1986), 10Google Scholar.

6 To see a defense of specialized knowledge, and modern intellectual history, against the ambition of engaging with a popular audience, see Faust, Drew, Hartog, Hendrik, Hollinger, David A., Iriye, Akira, Limerick, Patricia Nelson, Painter, Nell Irvin, Roediger, David, Ryan, Mary, and Taylor, Alan, “Interchange: The Practice of History,” Journal of American History 90/2 (2003), 576–611CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Here I must disclose that not only do I know personally and feel professionally indebted to all three of the authors under review, but also I am particularly indebted to Jill Lepore in ways that are both well documented and beyond all reckoning.

8 Perry, Lewis, Intellectual Life in America: A History (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

9 One line in the original article and the footnote supporting it were erroneous. Therefore the original wording of this footnote has been removed.

10 On overdeterminism in historical argumentation see Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Ratner-Rosenhagen's charge is implicit in her subtitle “A Brief History,” and she notes in her acknowledgments (ix) that Nancy Toff invited her to take on the project. Lepore acknowledges that “John Durbin at Norton asked me if I would write this book” (792).

12 Ratner-Rosenhagen mentions Haskell's seminal essay “The Curious Persistence of Rights Talk in ‘the Age of Interpretation’” (1987) in a chapter on the late twentieth century (171), but here she seems to be signifying his debate with David Brion Davis over antislavery, collected in Ashworth, John, Bender, Thomas, Davis, David Brion, and Haskell, Thomas, eds., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar. One of the valuable aspects of Ratner-Rosenhagen's book is how she both represents seminal works of intellectual history from the past several decades and provides pointers for interested readers to find that work.

13 Her use of the concept of an American mind may thus be said to be a fiction in the sense not of something false, but of something made; see Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 I put this adventitious circumstance in historical perspective in “Philosophy vs. Philosophers: A Problem in American Intellectual History,” IN Haberski, Raymond Jr and Hartman, Andrew, EDS., American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (Ithaca, 2018), 55–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Curti, Merle, The Growth of American Thought (New York, 1943, 1951)Google Scholar.

17 The historian W. E. B. Du Bois certainly understood this problem, and wrote about it skillfully, but white historians largely ignored his work, as shown in Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the Historical Profession (New York, 1998), 231–2Google Scholar, 249 n., 485–6. Morgan, Edmund S. addressed the problem in American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975)Google Scholar.

18 Henry Steele Commager, “Topics: Revolution 1776 and 1969,” New York Times, 6 July 1969, at www.nytimes.com/1969/07/05/archives/topics-revolution-1776-and-1969.html.

19 Louis E. Lomax, “To the Editor,” New York Times, 19 July 1969, at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1969/07/19/90112994.pdf.

20 The most recent edition is Capper, Charles and Hollinger, David A., eds., The American Intellectual Tradition, 7th edn (New York, 2015)Google Scholar.

21 Lepore, Jill, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.

22 White, Richard, “New Yorker Nation,” Reviews in American History 47/2 (2019), 159–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wood, Gordon S., “No Thanks for the Memories,” New York Review of Books 58/1 (2011), 40–42Google Scholar. McConville, Bernard, “Of Slavery and Sources,” Reviews in American History 34/3 (2006), 281–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Kloppenberg, James T., Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (New York, 2016), 592Google Scholar.

24 Rodgers, Daniel T., The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gilbert, James B., Work without Salvation: America's Intellectuals and Industrial Alienation, 1880–1910 (Baltimore, 1977)Google Scholar. I treat Davidson and the Breadwinners’ College in The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition (New York, 2015), 219–20, 257, 310.

25 Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (1982), 113–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rodgers, , Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (New York, 1987)Google Scholar. Rodgers, , “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992), 11–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Kloppenberg, James T., “Thinking Historically: A Manifesto of Pragmatic Hermeneutics,” Modern Intellectual History 9/1 (2012), 201–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Rodgers, Daniel T., Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 On thinking of American origins as Spanish rather than English see Taylor, Alan, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

29 Miller, Perry, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA, 1956)Google Scholar.