American Intellectual History Research Articles

Marshall Plan or neocolonization? The Model Cities Program and Black planning criticism

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the writing of Black activists, planners, and critics to reconcile two opposing perceptions of the Model Cities Program: an initiative known for its elevation of Black elected officials and a program that used the guise of citizen participation to stifle more radical forms of dissent. In 1966, Model Cities emerged in part from the call for a domestic Marshall Plan for Black Americans. Yet as the program began making incremental changes to the country’s neighbourhoods from 1967 to the early 1970s, participants and critics instead began to see Model Cities’ relationship to Black Americans as a new form of colonialism. To determine how this shift occurred, this paper analyses this critical commentary against the archival evidence of Model Cities implementation in the cities in which it appeared. Situating these authors’ arguments within the parallel emergence of Black studies and participatory planning as well as within larger Cold War diplomatic history, planning history, and African American intellectual history reveals how visions of revolution turned into a program of representation. Meanwhile, the plans these figures produced as part of Model Cities point to what a revolutionary program might yet be.

Early Black Thought Leaders and the Reframing of American Intellectual History

Abstract: This essay examines the broad impact of African American thought leadership on early American intellectual history. Though marginalized in many mainstream histories of American intellectual life–which often focus on the emergence of Black philosophers and Black professional historians later in the 19th century -- early national Black thinkers helped shape public understanding of critical ideas in American society and politics, including the meaning of citizenship and civil rights, emancipation and equality, and racial justice. African Americans also influenced public discourses on other key topics in American intellectual life, including the nature of human dignity and spiritual redemption in the Second Great Awakening, the meaning of Romanticism and Transcendentalism in American reform culture, and the authority of science and technology in antebellum society. Using the concept of thought leadership as a framing device to understand the power and impact of early Black ideas, I follow recent trends in the field of African American intellectual history that focus on that way that African American men and women became public authorities on key ideas and issues in American culture between the American Revolution and Civil War. Though they did not often occupy positions of educational, institutional, or legal power (the main provinces of intellectual leadership), Black thought leaders had a significant impact on early American intellectual history.

Introduction: The Life of the Mind in the Early Republic

Abstract: This essay introduces the five articles of this issue’s special forum on American intellectual history in the early republic. Including other recent works in the field, the essay evaluates how current scholarship diverges from or corrects the conventional narrative that has centered elite Anglo-Protestant intellectuals from the beginning of the discipline until recently. Defining terms including “America” and “intellectual” is crucial to understanding the various contributions and how they collectively turn away from American exceptionalism, a progressive view of American history, the notion of a collective American mind, and the acceptance of intellectual authority or elite status as indicative of historical value. Indigenous, African American, Catholic, Mexican-American, and Californiana voices reveal American thinkers who were skeptical of Anglo-Protestant premises, had perspectives worth considering, and made contributions to the history of American thought even while historians ignored them. The current generation of scholarship in American intellectual history marks a major revision of the last great disciplinary revision of the field after the rise of the new social history. Yet despite this promise, the institutional deterioration of higher education in the United States imperils the field.

Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe

Reviewed by: Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe Jason Phillips (bio) Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought. Edited by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 242. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $29.95.) Insiders, Outsiders showcases exciting new work in southern history, and most of it focuses on the Civil War era. Dedicated to Michael O'Brien, the volume reflects the vibrancy and curiosity that marked his work and inspired his field to explore the South's diversity of thought. In the introduction, editors Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe also acknowledge how the 1977 Wingspread conference shifted American intellectual history toward a broader engagement with cultural values and practices. Whereas conventional intellectual histories studied the persistence of ideas across space and time, this newer approach explained how thoughts developed within distinct historical contexts. Despite this more holistic approach, the volume that resulted from Wingspread, New Directions in American Intellectual History (1979), and more recent anthologies, including The Worlds of American Intellectual History (2017) and American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (2018), lack literary studies.1 With its long tradition of collaboration between historians and literary critics, southern studies—including works like Insiders, Outsiders—encourage interdisciplinary conversations by sharing important questions, theories, and methods. Gardner and Stowe organize their book into two parts that explore common themes in southern history. In part 1, historians study intellectual life in the South to consider how the region affected thinking within its borders and was, in turn, changed by that thinking. These essays range beyond the usual subjects of intellectual history. Stephen Berry argues that the "southernness" of Edgar Allan Poe questioned mainstream American and British faith in progress, capitalism, and destiny. Poe yearned to belong to a pantheon with Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other contemporary luminaries, but his realism and rage offended their clique, making him the insider's outsider. Michael T. Bernath uncovers how efforts to purge a South Carolina community of northern teachers after John Brown's raid exposed internal divisions along class lines. Only the wealthiest families could afford to hire northern tutors for their children, but this luxury became a social and political liability when sectional fervor and hysteria increased. Beth Barton Schweiger calls for new book histories of the South that focus on the uses and circulations of texts instead of their production. She encourages us to consider a book's linguistic, musical, and anthropological customs as it traveled through the region, touching everyone from [End Page 134] intellectuals to illiterates. Timothy J. Williams studies an obscure book, Edwin Wiley Fuller's autobiographical novel Sea-Gift (1873), to interpret southern men's fantasies during Reconstruction. In search of personal greatness and a utopian South, Fuller's Lost Cause romance focuses on the future, not the past. Mitchell Snay concludes part 1 by analyzing different Reconstruction writers, the journalists and politicians who saw immigration as a panacea for the southern economy after emancipation. His essay suggests the global dimensions of Reconstruction and how immigration debates exposed assumptions about race, citizenship, and capitalism, and how they still do today. In part 2, literary critics take the lead to interpret thinking about the South. Melanie Benson Taylor opens this section with an insightful essay on southern literature and the Anthropocene. The apocalyptic perspective of southern writers and the region's history of environmental destruction and dispossession frame southern stories as profound commentaries on humanity's endangerment to itself and others. Next, John Grammer identifies a "southern turn" in New Journalism by focusing on the careers of Willie Morris, Marshall Frady, and Larry L. King. As southern white men, this "Wrecking Crew" reported the civil rights movement from a privileged position—that of insiders who enjoyed better access than northern journalists, while staying outside the perils that threatened Black writers. Scott Romine explores the inchoate and contradictory identities of Lost Cause southerners by focusing on different versions of Edward Pollard's iconic text. His delightful essay introduces "subintellectual history," or "the history of ideas that are not quite complicated, as articulated by southerners...

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Elegant conservation: reimagining protected area stewardship in the 21st century

We present an approach to the conservation of protected areas that aligns cultural truths with scientific truths to increase community capacity for conservation. This alignment, which we call elegant conservation, asks protected area managers to reimagine how conservation can be inclusive of cultures and subcultures whose members value protected areas, but not in the same way. Reimagining how protected area managers approach conservation requires them to observe closely and holistically, with fresh eyes, human consciousness and behavior as well as relationships between people and between people and nature. Our approach connects the humanities, Western sciences, and other forms of knowledge, including Indigenous knowledge, in a manner that more sustainably builds social support for conservation. We first offer a heuristic of seven conditions that protected area managers can analyze when sizing up conservation issues and the people involved. We then propose a heuristic of five human tendencies—elements of human consciousness—that can help protected area managers and their partners organize constructive responses to any conservation issue. Our model of elegant conservation offers a pragmatic, holistic, inclusive alternative to top-down, reductive management approaches and is an outgrowth of modern American intellectual history, especially since the end of the Cold War, ca. 1989–1990. Elegant conservation presents an opportunity to help people find common ground and move protected area management beyond its origins in settler colonialism at a time of national and planetary crisis.

Concerning Science

Concerning Science David K. Hecht (bio) Andrew Jewett,Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. 356 pp. Notes and index. $42.00 Science matters. In his impressive Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America, Andrew Jewett skillfully explores a variety of different critiques of science across twentieth-century United States history. These critiques do not always align in their particulars: some are based in religion, while others are secular. Some come from the political right, others from the left. Some seem to originate from the cultural margins, whereas others were mainstream. Moreover, as Jewett acknowledges, there is no consistent definition of science that runs through all the critiques. What unites them is a sense that there is something amiss in the world—modernity, secularism, amorality, dehumanization, totalitarianism, materialism, technocracy—and that science is to blame. Science matters, for these critics, and in all the wrong ways. Science under Fire can be profitably read as a comprehensive treatment of science skepticism in modern U.S. history. Jewett effectively distills the essences of a staggeringly wide range of thinkers and writers across many decades. “Although a concern with science’s corrupting cultural effects has never been the dominant strain in American thinking about science,” he writes, “it has been persistent, influential, and consequential for nearly a century—above all, in the post-World War II ‘golden age’” (p. 16). Having accelerated after 1945, such skepticism has become entrenched in recent decades and one of its most prominent manifestations—climate change denial—is proving to have planetary implications. However, Jewett, counterintuitively but powerfully, scarcely mentions climate change. While some readers might wish for a greater engagement with our contemporary crisis, I welcomed Jewett’s more historical focus. After all, we have any number of thoughtful analyses concerning the origin and nature of climate change denial.1 What we don’t have is exactly what Science under Fire provides: a synthesis of science skepticism before the current era. Like all good history, this book demonstrates that its subject is far more complicated than we might assume simply by considering its most recent form. [End Page 389] This is an important contribution. But science also matters here in a deeper and more methodologically novel way. Jewett uses “science” as a tool with which to explore American intellectual history more broadly. This is not a history of science, but rather an account of the many ways in which American thinkers, writers, clergyman, and educators mobilized science as a rhetorical concept in defining and pressing their social visions. Jewett explains: “this book explores conceptions of science as a social and cultural force, rather than a method or a subject” (p. 5). Precisely because these actors’ ultimate concerns lay outside of science, the stakes of the debate were monumental. Jewett writes, for example, of the concerns of many American Catholics that teaching evolution was just one more expression “of a materialistic, self-divinizing form of rationalism that had plagued the West for centuries” (p. 61). Similarly, he contends that after World War II “it became a matter of simple common sense for many scholars that the Western world was experiencing an epochal modern crisis and that scientism lay at its root” (p. 123). Few of the critics who populate the pages of Science under Fire saw their concerns in narrow, policy terms; even those who offered political critiques did so with an eye toward epic battles between democracy and freedom on one hand with totalitarianism and repression on the other. Science under Fire is thus an intellectual history of (perceived) cultural and intellectual crisis. As such, it should be read alongside such books as Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (2015), Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America (2019), or Daniel T. Rodgers’ Age of Fracture (2011). All three of these books—and there are certainly others—are ambitious and impressive syntheses of much intellectual history (and historiography) in the service of understanding the grand sweep of American culture and ideas. Jewett’s contribution to this literature is to focus on science. Of course, he is not the first intellectual historian...

The Unheard Voice of Law in Bartolomé de Las Casas's “Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias.”

Few authors of colonial Spanish American history are as well known as Bartolomé de Las Casas. Among his many works, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias stands out as the most widely read and discussed, from its publication in the mid-sixteenth century up until our own times. David Thomas Orique joins the long list of commentators on this controversial treatise with a detailed study in which he proposes a legal reading. Indeed, Orique's central thesis is that the Brevísima relación is a text written for legal purposes and situated within an important tradition of legal literature in the Iberian world. Consequently, Orique takes a critical distance from certain interpretations of the Brevísima relación that see the work either as a historical and reliable denunciation of colonial violence or as a false and malicious criticism of the Spanish empire that would lay the groundwork for the creation of the so-called Black Legend.Orique's analytic strategy consists, to begin with, in reconstructing the context in which the text was produced. Following Las Casas's biography, the author describes the Spanish cultural and intellectual worlds of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: the pedagogy in universities, the primary circulating texts, the most important theological and juridical traditions, and the political problems that framed the debates of the era, particularly those surrounding the colonization of the Americas. The author develops these subjects in chapters 2 through 5.After Orique describes the context, chapters 6 and 7 make an exact analysis of the Brevísima relación to explain Las Casas's treatise or, put in Quentin Skinner's terms, what the author is doing in his writing. To this end, Orique describes the work's forensic structure and rhetoric, the legal vocabulary utilized, the insertion of testimonies and probanzas in the account, and how the text was addressed to royal authorities. In this way, Orique shows that the Brevísima relación is eminently a legal text, linked to the legal genres of relaciones, denuncias, and peticiones, that aimed to transform how the colonization of the Americas was being carried out in favor of the continent's Indigenous inhabitants.Orique's central argument is not entirely original, as he himself notes. Since the middle of the last century, various studies on Bartolomé de Las Casas have recognized the importance of the legal dimension of his thought, to such an extent that he has been described as a jurist, a canonist, a public advocate, and a public prosecutor. Taking up this perspective, Orique makes a deeper and more detailed analysis of the weight that traditions of civil and canon law exerted on Las Casas's writings, especially on his Brevísima relación. Orique's meticulous review of this famous treatise provides Las Casas studies with solid arguments for understanding the Brevísima relación as a legal document.However, in my opinion, the main contribution made by The Unheard Voice of Law in Bartolomé de Las Casas's “Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias” is found in the chapters that reconstruct the context of the production of Las Casas's work. Through reading numerous treatises of the time as well as a broad historiographical review, Orique presents an overview of the Hispanic American thought of early modernity, of the discussions that defined the field of politics, and of the multiple political traditions and languages used within the Spanish monarchy. This is an excellent synthesis, set out in clear and entertaining prose, that works very well as an introductory text for students and nonspecialist historians who seek to study sixteenth-century Spanish American intellectual history. It will also, of course, serve those interested in Bartolomé de Las Casas, a key figure in the history of the Americas, Spain, and the world.

Contributing Authors

Say Burgin is assistant professor of history at Dickinson College. Her publications have appeared in the Women's History Review, Journal of American Studies, Journal of International Women's Studies, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her first book project examines the myth that Black Power was “antiwhite” and the white fight for Black Power in Detroit. Say was a regular contributor to Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. She also co-created the educational website Rosa Parks's Biography: A Resource for Teaching Rosa Parks (https://rosaparksbiography.org/). Follow her on Twitter @sayburgin.Robert T. Chase is associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. His research and teaching interests include the history of mass incarceration and the construction of what historians call “the carceral state.” He is also the co-director of the national organization Historians Against Slavery (HAS). He is an expert in social justice, Latino/a, and civil rights movements, and political and African American history. He is the editor of the book Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance (2019). His book We are Not Slaves won the Best Book Award from the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice, American Society of Criminology; the Hank Lacayo Best Labor-Themed Award from the International Latino Book Award; and honorable mention for the Betty and Alfred Lee McClung Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology.Simon Hall is professor of modern history at the University of Leeds, where his research and teaching focus on the civil rights–Black Power movements, the student radicalism of the long 1960s, and global protest during the Cold War. His previous books include 1956: The World in Revolt (2016) and Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s (2005).Brandon James Render is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include twentieth-century United States social and intellectual history, post-1945 social movements and “the culture wars,” and public policy. His dissertation, “Colorblind University,” traces the intellectual genealogy of race-neutral policies and practices in higher education through admissions policies, departmental structure, and curriculum design. In addition to service as a graduate research fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy in 2018–19, he is the 2021-22 Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University.

Interview with Nadia Nurhussein Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism in African America

In October 2020, Adom Getachew interviewed Nadia Nurhussein about her recent book “Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America” published by Princeton University Press in 2019. Black Land delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power. Nurhussein navigates texts by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Harry Dean, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, and others, alongside images and performances that show the intersection of African America with Ethiopia during historic political shifts. From a description of a notorious 1920 Star Order of Ethiopia flag-burning demonstration in Chicago to a discussion of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1935, Nurhussein illuminates the growing complications that modern Ethiopia posed for American writers and activists who wrestled with Pan-African ideal and the reality of Ethiopia as an imperialist state. Black Land was Winner of the MSA Book Prize, from the Modernist Studies Association, finalist for the Pauli Murray Book Prize from the African American Intellectual History Society and shortlisted for the MAAH Stone Book Award from the Museum of African American History.

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff (review)

Reviewed by: From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff Kirsten Fermaglich Nancy Sinkoff. From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 538 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000337 In From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, Nancy Sinkoff has done the important work of reclaiming Lucy Dawidowicz's significance as an American public intellectual in the years after World War II. Although few scholars have previously identified Dawidowicz as a member of the famed New York Jewish intellectuals, Sinkoff makes a compelling case for this categorization. Despite Dawidowicz's significance in helping to establish the intentionalist school of Holocaust thought, which argued for the primacy of Hitler's antisemitism in explaining the origins of the Holocaust, she has mostly been forgotten in books on New York Jewish intellectuals, and has similarly fallen off the map of American intellectual history, and of American Jewish history. By describing Dawidowicz's friendships with figures like Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, and by highlighting her [End Page 482] public prominence as an interpreter of the Holocaust and of eastern European Jewish culture, as well as expertise in Yiddish language and literature, Sinkoff reclaims Dawidowicz's significance in American Jewish and intellectual life. As the title of the book suggests, Dawidowicz moved politically from liberal to conservative over the course of her life, a trajectory that mirrored that of many other New York Jewish intellectuals. Born in 1915 in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, Dawidowicz lived in Jewish neighborhoods in the Bronx, and attended high school and college in New York City. She was also deeply involved in the secular Yiddishist community of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. Like other New York Jewish intellectuals, the left-wing politics of this environment shaped her early life as a member of the Young Communist League and National Student League. By 1938, however, like many on the Left, she had broken with the Soviet Union, and intensified her studies of Yiddish, accepting a fellowship as a graduate student at the YIVO in Vilna, and departing for research in Poland that same year. Those experiences became defining ones in shaping her identification with Polish Jews facing destruction. Dawidowicz barely escaped the Nazi occupation and felt deeply all her life the deaths of her friends and patrons in Poland. Immediately after the war, she worked with the YIVO and the Joint Distribution Committee, tracking down and collecting the Yiddish literary treasures scattered throughout Europe, as well as working with survivors in DP camps. In 1949, she began almost twenty years on the staff of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). During that time, Sinkoff shows, her politics moved steadily rightwards. Her reports on communism and the Soviet Union reflected her fervent anticommunism and anxieties about Jewish radicalism, while her work on religious minorities and Black-Jewish relationships in the United States reflected at first the standard liberal position of the AJC, but increasingly signaled dissent from strict separation of church and state, and discomfort with Black social and cultural differences from Jews. By the late 1960s, when she left the AJC, her politics had already turned inward to the history and well-being of the Jewish community and rightward away from the universal ideologies that marked Jewish liberalism. That preoccupation with eastern European Jewish history was the final and perhaps most significant chapter of her life, as described by Sinkoff. Dawidowicz published two major books that established her as an expert in eastern European Jewish history and the Holocaust—The Golden Tradition and Hitler's War against the Jews—and cemented her relationship with New York Jewish intellectuals, who at that moment were experiencing a similar political and intellectual turn towards Judaism, the Jewish community, and the Holocaust. Although she had planned on publishing a major book on the history of the American Jewish community towards the end of her life, she never completed it; it was her work on eastern European Jewry and the Holocaust that marked her professional and...

Anthropology and the politics of alterity: A Latin American dialectic and its relevance for ontological anthropologies

Recent anglophone ontological anthropologies have an important Latin American intellectual and political history that is rarely fully acknowledged. This article outlines some of that history, arguing that debates about the politics of this ‘ontological turn’ should be read in the context of a tension between political economy and cosmological approaches that have been a feature of Latin American anthropology in some form since the early 20th century, and that are deeply implicated in histories of conquest and colonialism, including internal colonialism. This conceptual history helps to explain both the desire of some scholars to avoid a certain kind of politicisation and the argument that methodological and theoretical innovation within anthropology is political in itself. But it also means that ontological anthropology encounters some of the same challenges faced by indigenous movements confronted with similar choices.

Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage by O. Alan Weltzien

Reviewed by: Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage by O. Alan Weltzien Paul Lindholdt O. Alan Weltzien, Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2020. 257 pp. Hardcover, $40. Professor emeritus Alan Weltzien has hit upon a captivating story that begins in Dillon, Montana, where he taught for twenty-nine years at the University of Montana Western. Author Thomas Savage was raised there, moved East for college, wed his sweetheart, fathered three children, wrote thirteen novels— and conducted an adulterous homosexual affair that threatened to disintegrate his household. A batch of family facts buoys the psychological insights in this first Savage biography. The book ventures into territory many straight angels fear to tread— into gender politics. Annie Proulx, in her afterword to the reissue of Savage’s novel The Power of the Dog (1967, 2001), characterizes the male protagonist as “a vicious bitch,” which Weltzien considers “a violent, homophobic phrase” (101). In novel after novel Thomas Savage returned to the landscapes of his childhood and young adulthood. Those landscapes include southwestern Montana and Central Idaho. “In his fiction,” Weltzien writes, “ranches wreck people and small towns often do as well” (223). In an approach-avoidance pattern combining inspiration and disdain, Savage recalls Thomas Wolfe and his Asheville, North Carolina; Sherwood Anderson and his Clyde, Ohio. Savage wrote a more autobiographical fiction than most of his predecessors, though, and Weltzien does a fine job of cross-referencing Savage relatives with their fictional avatars. The philistines that people his novels become mouthpieces for Savage to satirize the dearth of elegance he discovered in the Intermountain West. There is much to admire in the way this book places Savage within American intellectual history. Eschewing the genre Westerns of Zane Gray and Owen Wister, Savage instead practiced “a steady excoriation of his hometown” (178). He criticized the settler-colonial tradition made popular by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and other “professional Montanans” whom he discredited (188). Invited back to Dillon in 1983, Savage was a featured writer and keynote speaker at an arts festival— only after Guthrie turned the sponsors down. A fan of Savage and his “queer-inflected” West (215), Weltzien presents [End Page 87] an extended lament that the author remains a mere “footnote in American literary history” (208). The gender studies elements in this good biography recommend it. “Savage flaunted his gay desires through his luxury sports cars,” Weltzien writes, “the bright luster of their finish and the purr of their engines” serving as stand-ins for himself (73). Costly cars as identity markers, including a Rolls Royce, belied his economic condition: his books never sold well. The thirteen superb photos in the book modestly exclude a revealing nude photo of him that features “a festooned braid of seaweed serving as his G-string” (79). Commendable, too, is Weltzien’s sleuthing through Savage’s life to discover his male lover, one Tomie dePaola, who told a chilling story. The two were caught by surprise in Boston, and dePaola was battered by Savage’s upset son. Afterward, “Tom insisted on sex, which dePaola characterized as ‘very rough’” (93). Following that sad interlude together, Savage “cut ties and reverted to his older loyalty,” his wife and children (94). Alan Weltzien is a good friend whose work I admire. Having edited volumes on Rick Bass, Norman Maclean, and John McPhee, he has built a solid standing as a biographer. He has also published multiple articles on Savage, spoken on him at conferences, and led tours within what he dubs Savage West. Contrary to that other West, which is “a repository of national wish fulfillment perpetuated by popular cultural production” (215), Savage West is a literary site where women are accorded great respect and male ranchers get bared as the brutes and bullies that would turn Montana politically red. Parts of this biography seem to have been rushed into print. In 2019 Palme d’Or winner and director Jane Campion began filming The Power of the Dog, Savage’s most celebrated novel (110). In the interim, COVID hit, film production was delayed, and this biography bears a couple dozen blotches in documentation, grammar, spelling, and punctuation...

How Did We End Up With Donald Trump?

How Did We End Up With Donald Trump? John McMillian (bio) Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. 342 pp. Bibliography and index. $28.00 Hillary Clinton was likely in an upbeat mood on September 9, 2016. Earlier that day, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur had pledged $20 million to Democratic groups backing her presidential candidacy. Later that evening, she spoke at an LGBT fundraiser in Manhattan, before a large crowd that had just been warmed up by Barbra Streisand. Naturally, Clinton's remarks were recorded.1 When she quipped that you could fit "half" of Donald Trump's supporters into a "basket of deplorables," her supporters responded with laughter, cheers, and applause. Clinton was seemingly so pleased by the crowd's laudations that she extemporized her next sentence, which also was about Trump supporters: "They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it."2 Trump pounced on her statement via Twitter, and Clinton apologized the next day. But her gaffe was not soon forgotten. It did not help Clinton's cause when a group of celebrated left-of-center columnists amplified her remarks. Armed with polling and research data, Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic), Jamelle Bouie (Slate), Charles Blow (the New York Times), Jonathan Chait (New York), and German Lopez (Vox) argued that Clinton had no reason to apologize. A few of them went further. If Clinton had erred at all, they said, it was only because she had downplayed the portion of Trump supporters who were, indeed, hateful bigots.3 There was no gainsaying that the GOP had taken a dark turn. The 2016 presidential campaign should have made clear that Trump was not fit for the Oval Office. He was vain, vicious, and vulgar. No one had ever seen a candidate so childish, so eager to put his base motives and epic resentments on proud display. Trump was picking at the sores of a wounded nation, and he seemed delighted to do so. Still, the situation required deeper understanding. Scholars, analysts, and political professionals weighed in on the big questions of the day: What foul forces were feeding Trumpism? What knowledge from the past could shed light on our current problems? In June of 2016, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a syllabus for a course titled, "Trump 101."4 This was a collaborative [End Page 310] project involving twenty accomplished scholars from a range of disciplines, but most of them were historians. The syllabus's authors left no doubt that they regarded Trumpism as a baleful phenomenon. Among the classic works they recommended were Theodor Adorno's (et al.'s) The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1966). Harvey Mansfield, the conservative political philosopher, urged readers to turn attention to such ancient thinkers as Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle, who warned that when demagogues attain power in democracies, the demagogue is not chiefly to blame; the blame rests with those who elect him. None of the arguments or ideas embedded in the "Trump 101" syllabus are controversial in academic circles. Still, "Trump 101" was not well received. The problem, according to 349 humanities scholars who signed an open letter that appeared on the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) website, was that the syllabus did not recommend any works by "scholars of color" or "LGBTQ people." That was true. Although numerous books on the syllabus examined the perniciousness of racism and ethnocentrism, those books were written by white authors. The oversight led the letter's signatories to conclude that Trump 101's authors were "committed to presenting a 'whites only' portrayal of American political history." The letter's 349 signatories took the lack of nonwhite authors on "Trump 101" as evidence that the syllabus was "inappropriate," "highly offensive," "intellectually dishonest," "irresponsible," "racially illiterate," and "an artifact of racism."5 Within a week, two historians who critiqued "Trump 101"—N.D.B. Connolly, of Johns Hopkins University, and Keisha N. Blain, of the University of Pittsburgh—had crowd-sourced an alternative document, "Trump Syllabus 2.0." This new syllabus was five times larger than its predecessor, partly...

The State and Future of Black Women's Studies: The Black Women's Studies Association and the National Women's Studies Association in Conversation

230 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nneka D. Dennie The State and Future of Black Women’s Studies: The Black Women’s Studies Association and the National Women’s Studies Association in Conversation On February 25, 2021, the Black Women’s Studies Association (BWSA) and National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) partnered for one of NWSA’s Kitchen Table Talks—a new initiative spearheaded by NWSA President Kaye Wise Whitehead to foster dialogue between NWSA and other organizations. The event, titled “Space Making: State/Future of Black Women’s Studies,” featured three panelists and was moderated by Whitehead. The featured speakers were Stephanie Andrea Allen (BWSA conference chair), Jacinta R. Saffold (BWSA co-founder and treasurer), and Erica L. Williams (member of the NWSA Governing Council). Allen is a Black lesbian writer and publisher whose scholarship examines how lesbian literature and film responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that invisibilize Black lesbians; she is a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana University. Saffold is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Orleans who researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, hip hop studies, and digital humanities. Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at Spelman College, whose work has examined sex tourism and Black feminist activism in Brazil. Together, Whitehead, Allen, Saffold, and Williams explored their hopes for Black Women’s Studies and illuminated the challenges and joys of advancing the field. News and Views 231 The collaboration between BWSA and NWSA is a testament to how far Black Women’s Studies has come over the past fifty years and a promise of where it may continue to go in the future. NWSA was founded in 1977 and has since served as a hub for researchers, educators, and practitioners who interrogate questions of women and gender in their work. For decades, NWSA has been central to the nationwide US institutionalization of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. By contrast, BWSA is a young organization that is continuing to grow. In 2018, Saffold and I co-founded BWSA in order to provide a community for scholars working in the field of Black Women’s Studies. BWSA is the only professional association specifically designed to bring scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation about research that centers Black women. We launched BWSA with the goal of ensuring that future generations of scholars can readily access networks and mentorship from researchers who encounter a common question: when your work is simultaneously “too Black” and “too woman” for your field, department, or institution, what do you do? Drawing inspiration from well-established organizations in which we frequently participated, such as NWSA, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), and the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), Saffold and I sought to build a space that cultivated a Black feminist ethic of care for both the research and the researchers. In that spirit, BWSA provides resources to help scholars do their best work, including a mentorship program, a virtual writing community, a calls-for-papers list for publications, and article as well as graduate student paper prizes. It was an honor to join an organization as trusted and respected as NWSA for a dialogue about our shared visions for Black Women’s Studies. Three key themes emerged from the panelists’ conversation with each other. They repeatedly returned to the importance of making financial commitments to Black Women’s Studies, creating conditions to support Black women’s intellectual labor, and practicing self-care. Speakers explored the interplay between the responsibilities that institutions, communities, and individuals have to Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist scholars. They observed that in order for departments and universities to foster interdisciplinary work on Black women, they need to move beyond paying lip service to the idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion matter; there needs to be permanent funding for work on race, 232 News and Views gender, class, and sexuality. Panelists also emphasized that Black women being in community with each other and supporting one another have always been central to...

The State and Future of Black Women's Studies: The Black Women's Studies Association and the National Women's Studies Association in Conversation

230 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nneka D. Dennie The State and Future of Black Women’s Studies: The Black Women’s Studies Association and the National Women’s Studies Association in Conversation On February 25, 2021, the Black Women’s Studies Association (BWSA) and National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) partnered for one of NWSA’s Kitchen Table Talks—a new initiative spearheaded by NWSA President Kaye Wise Whitehead to foster dialogue between NWSA and other organizations. The event, titled “Space Making: State/Future of Black Women’s Studies,” featured three panelists and was moderated by Whitehead. The featured speakers were Stephanie Andrea Allen (BWSA conference chair), Jacinta R. Saffold (BWSA co-founder and treasurer), and Erica L. Williams (member of the NWSA Governing Council). Allen is a Black lesbian writer and publisher whose scholarship examines how lesbian literature and film responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that invisibilize Black lesbians; she is a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana University. Saffold is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Orleans who researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, hip hop studies, and digital humanities. Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at Spelman College, whose work has examined sex tourism and Black feminist activism in Brazil. Together, Whitehead, Allen, Saffold, and Williams explored their hopes for Black Women’s Studies and illuminated the challenges and joys of advancing the field. News and Views 231 The collaboration between BWSA and NWSA is a testament to how far Black Women’s Studies has come over the past fifty years and a promise of where it may continue to go in the future. NWSA was founded in 1977 and has since served as a hub for researchers, educators, and practitioners who interrogate questions of women and gender in their work. For decades, NWSA has been central to the nationwide US institutionalization of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. By contrast, BWSA is a young organization that is continuing to grow. In 2018, Saffold and I co-founded BWSA in order to provide a community for scholars working in the field of Black Women’s Studies. BWSA is the only professional association specifically designed to bring scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation about research that centers Black women. We launched BWSA with the goal of ensuring that future generations of scholars can readily access networks and mentorship from researchers who encounter a common question: when your work is simultaneously “too Black” and “too woman” for your field, department, or institution, what do you do? Drawing inspiration from well-established organizations in which we frequently participated, such as NWSA, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), and the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), Saffold and I sought to build a space that cultivated a Black feminist ethic of care for both the research and the researchers. In that spirit, BWSA provides resources to help scholars do their best work, including a mentorship program, a virtual writing community, a calls-for-papers list for publications, and article as well as graduate student paper prizes. It was an honor to join an organization as trusted and respected as NWSA for a dialogue about our shared visions for Black Women’s Studies. Three key themes emerged from the panelists’ conversation with each other. They repeatedly returned to the importance of making financial commitments to Black Women’s Studies, creating conditions to support Black women’s intellectual labor, and practicing self-care. Speakers explored the interplay between the responsibilities that institutions, communities, and individuals have to Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist scholars. They observed that in order for departments and universities to foster interdisciplinary work on Black women, they need to move beyond paying lip service to the idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion matter; there needs to be permanent funding for work on race, 232 News and Views gender, class, and sexuality. Panelists also emphasized that Black women being in community with each other and supporting one another have always been central to...

The Rise of African American Intellectual History

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.

The American Mind Is Dead, Long Live the American Mind

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.

American Intellectual History and the Cultural Turn

American Intellectual History and the Cultural Turn Ryan C. McIlhenny (bio) Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 222 pp. Notes and index. $18.95. It seems that no other branch of historical study is as buoyant as intellectual history. There have been dips in terms of its popularity, especially in relation to what may be the sexier developments within cultural studies, but intellectual history consistently reappears to provide critical assessment not only of historical changes but also changes in the methods of historical research. In the generation after Merle Curti, Perry Miller, or Henry Commager, intellectual history went through a revival in the late 1970s, due in no insignificant way to the Wingspread Conference of 1977, a gathering of historians including Paul Conkin, John Higham, Gordon Wood, David Hollinger, Dorothy Ross, Henry May, and Thomas Bender. Wingspread played an important role in joining older approaches to intellectual history with new creative discoveries within the humanities, breathing new life into this mode of historical writing. Distinct from the history of ideas and the history of philosophy, intellectual historians, according to Peter Gordon, see ideas as “historically conditioned” and thereby “best understood within some larger context, whether it be the context of social struggle and institutional change, intellectual biography (individual or collective), or some larger context of cultural or linguistic dispositions (now often called ‘discourses’).”1 Aware of the historical conditions from which ideas emerge—not to mention, as Daniel Wickberg does in American Labyrinth (2018), the contingency of contexts—intellectual historians are also cognizant of how such contingencies shape the way that they understand the methods of their own craft. Disciplines across the intellectual spectrum have been influenced by developments in cultural studies. Scholars—not just those in the humanities or social sciences, but also in the hard sciences—have demonstrated greater historical awareness, becoming increasingly wary of presenting ideas as normative or static. Social history steeped in the turbid currents of the 1960s, emphasizing long-ignored marginalized groups, was followed almost immediately by cultural history, which considered at a deeper philosophical level the social identities created through textual discourse. The [End Page 165] attendees at Wingspread, as well as those who helped author the collection of essays in New Directions in Intellectual History (1979), engaged the messiness of ideas, especially those articulated by iconoclastic intellectuals like Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz. The cultural presupposes the social and thus edges ever closer to the philosophical. Cultural historians are often reluctant to attribute causation to ideas, but Ratner-Rosenhagen and others would argue that causation can be the result of ideas, including cultural ones related to identity. Consequently, the cultural, especially in regard to ideas, has provided fodder for intellectual historians, since both are “invested in decoding meaning,” write Raymond Haberski and Andrew Hartman in American Labyrinth (2018), and thus “interested in language as a historical source.”2 For James Livingston, cultural change “is the groundwork of intellectual innovation.”3 Benjamin Alpers likewise suggests that cultural history has had an important impact on “intellectual historical practice” and that cultural and intellectual history should be viewed “as a single subfield.”4 Since the 1980s, cultural history has emphasized the pluralistic and unintended happenings from below and from the periphery, challenging first-principles foundationalism, eschewing any form of unidirectional history—whether top-down, bottom-up, or side-to-side (core-periphery)—and welcoming the ongoing creations of and negotiations within these spaces. The revolt of cultural scholars against simplistic bifurcations has led to an acceptance of ideas as contingent, inherently unstable, yet rich with possibilities, revitalizing in turn a dialectical method without a rigid teleology. Since Wingspread, contemporary intellectual historians have come to appreciate such dynamism, expanding interpretive boundaries and injecting the field with new and relevant insights. Following the success of American Nietzsche (2011), Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America embraces the creative possibilities of intellectual history, making the multiple worlds of ideas more palatable for readers. Daniel Rodgers, a leading figure among contemporary intellectual historians, identifies movement “as a central motif in intellectual history,” comparing it to a kind of “borderlands history.”5 Ratner-Rosenhagen agrees...

Skepticism and Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War by Christopher Grasso

Reviewed by: Skepticism and Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War by Christopher Grasso Tara Strauch (bio) Skepticism and Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War. By Christopher Grasso. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 664. $34.95 cloth; $34.95 ebook) American religious history has changed drastically over the past one hundred years. Religious historians moved from the confessional histories of the nineteenth century towards examining religious groups as cultural entities. At times over the past two decades, scholars congratulated themselves on these changes in form and function. Perhaps that is why the premise behind Christopher Grasso's book was so striking to me. Grasso puts religious skepticism at the center of his study and in doing so reminds religious historians that belief is only one piece of the story. Rather than emphasizing belief, this book argues that antebellum Americans were far more open to religious skepticism, doubt, and freethinking than we often assume. And that doubt, in particular, drove early American intellectual history until the Civil War when the sacralization of North and South left no room for the skeptic in American public life. Grasso starts his investigation in the heady, politically charged world of revolutionary America where skepticism was often a political liability and a moral failing. Part one examines how the American Revolution enabled and encouraged skepticism while it also restricted skeptics from forming organized associations such as the Deistical societies that might give skepticism cultural and political legitimacy. Grasso places the "deist hero" Ethan Allen in conversation with the "deist monster" William Beadle and the faith of Jarena Lee with the skepticism of Elihu Palmer. Skepticism existed in eighteenth-century America but it could not flourish because of the institutional obstacles—like legal restrictions and religious patriotism—of the new nation. Part two, Enlightenments, considers the intersection of belief, economics, and morality by focusing particularly on Thomas Cooper's skepticism and economic support of slavery. Grasso contrasts Cooper's skepticism with the faith of Ezra Stiles Ely and David Nelson who [End Page 339] together founded Marion College in Missouri on the principles of "enlightened Christian moral economy" (p. 228). When the college failed, these two men came to see skepticism, and slavery, as the main cause. Concluding this section of the book, Grasso compares Nelson and Ely's splintered visions for the nation with the way in which anti-slavery brought New England Unitarians and skeptics back together. Tracing the arguments of George Bethune English, Theodore Parker, and Richard Hildreth among others, Grasso argues that this common moral cause pushed the threat of deism and skepticism away from that region for a time. Part three follows attempts to change American behaviors through radical social and spiritual reformations between 1820 and 1850. "Radical Reformers" like Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, and William Alcott emphasized communal living, diet, and purposeful living as keys to social change while others, like Orestes Brownson, moved from skepticism to faith and found religious ways of working for earthly reform. These reformers, however, conflicted with socially conservative Christians who argued, in various ways, that worldly success and economic security provided scant comfort in the next life. Part four, Sacred Causes, considers how "civil religious theology" or "public theology" shaped Americans' opinions about slavery, Christianity, and the Civil War. Smaller than the previous sections of the book these two chapters demonstrate how the South, or at least South Carolina, melded Christianity and pro-slavery thought to the exclusion of skepticism. In the North, meanwhile, individuals could work in unison against slavery while believing in different religions—some battling slavery in the name of God while others fought for the "promise of Freedom and Equality" (p. 395). This book is a masterpiece; it tells a big story through detailed and nuanced historical research. Skepticism and Faith provides a grand narrative of American history through the Civil War that rivals popular narratives of American progress and toleration. Instead, Grasso offers doubt and skepticism as the engine behind American [End Page 340] development. This is not a popular history book, however, as its dense prose weaves together intellectual biographies of many American thinkers. In any given chapter, Grasso brings three or four...