The Rise of African American Intellectual History

Abstract

This essay makes a decisive turn to the history and historiography of African American intellectual history, a field of study long relegated to the margins of the general field of US intellectual history. Its principal intention is to reflect on the origins, growth, and recent institutionalization of African American intellectual history while showing the relationship between those developments and broader trends within the US and, at times, European historical profession. This framework is meant as a corrective. African American intellectual history is a distinctive field with its own origins, objectives, and methods. Yet it also demands centering within US and global intellectual history. Marginalized for too long, African American intellectual history has long proposed and advanced innovative ways of doing and conceptualizing intellectual history. I suggest that this burgeoning field has important, generalizable lessons about the practice and possibilities of intellectual history writ large.