The Worlds of American Intellectual History

The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume explores ways in which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites--from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals--in which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred - some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures.The richness of contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across the Pacific to South Asia.

Introduction: Opening American ThoughtJames T. KloppenbergPart One: Frames1. What was the American Enlightenment?Caroline Winterer2. The "Woman Question" in the Age of Mass Democracy: From Movement History to Problem HistoryLeslie Butler3. "We People of Color": Colored Cosmopolitanism and the Borders of RaceNico Slate4. Curating the Black AtlanticJonathan HollowayPart Two: Justice5. The Sins of Slaves and the Slaves of Sin: Toward a History of Moral AgencyMargaret Abruzzo6. Nationalism and Cosmopolitan Humanity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political ScienceDuncan Kelly7. The Political Origins of Global JusticeSamuel MoynPart Three: Philosophy8. Unstiffening Theory: The Italian Magic Pragmatists and William JamesFrancesca Bordogna9. The Longing for Wisdom in Twentieth-Century US ThoughtJennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen10. Pain, Analytical Philosophy, and American Intellectual HistoryJoel Isaac11. On Lying: Writing Philosophical History after the Enlightenment and after ArendtSophia RosenfeldPart Four: Secularization12. Science and Religion in Postwar AmericaAndrew Jewett13. Religion within the Bounds of Democracy Alone: Habermas, Rawls, and the Trans-Atlantic Debate over Public ReasonPeter Gordon14. Christianity and Its American Fate: Where History Interrogates Secularization TheoryDavid HollingerPart Five: Method15. Paths in the Social History of IdeasDaniel T. Rodgers16. Toward a Free-Range Intellectual HistorySarah Igo17. New Directions, Then and NowAngus BurginAfterwordMichael O'BrienIndex