THE NEW AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Abstract

E. Brooks Holifield. Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture, 1521-1680. Boston: Twayne, 1989. 200 pp. Robert E. Shalhope. The Roots of Democracy: American Thought and Culture, 1760- 1800. Boston: Twayne, 1990. xvii + 190 pp. Jean V. Matthews. Toward a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800- 1830. Boston: Twayne, 1991. xi + 187 pp. Twenty years ago a series of books on American thought and culture would have been unimaginable. During the 1970s and 1980s American intellectual historians questioned not simply the form and method of their craft but its very existence. Indeed, in 1977, a gathering of intellectual historians at Racine, Wisconsin, debated both a rationale for their craft and an array of methodologies by which it might still be practised. Their deliberations led to the publication of New Directions in American Intellectual History, an influential book of essays, and to the founding of the Intellectual History Group, an organization which has sought to bring some coherence to the discussion of method in the practice of intellectual history. The Intellectual History Newsletter has offered readers a cross-section of that discourse as it unfolded in ensuing years, but it should also be read as an artifact of the angst which has pervaded intellectual history during the past two decades.1