look who's in the New York Times!

Recently I was perusing the news, minding my own business, when I was quite surprised to stumble across the name of our very own Andrew Hartman. In the New York Times "Room for Debate" blog, the paper's editors ask several experts to comment on a hot-button issue of the day. On September 14, the site featured Andrew and other pundits and intellectuals (including Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and religious and intellectual historian Patrick Allitt) sharing their thoughts on the question of "What is Socialism in 2009?" Read it here.

Teaching U.S. Intellectual History: Reflections On John Dewey

I am teaching a post-Civil War survey this fall at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The students are reading Out of Many (Vol. II, Prentice Hall), authored by John Mack Faragher, Mari Jo Buhle, Susan H. Armitage, and Daniel Czitrom. Since it's a 120-person lecture hall setting, I lecture. I prefer more interactive settings, but I'm not teaching this fall to find a venue for my deepest beliefs about authentic instruction---if you take my meaning.

For lecture fodder I chose to focus on expanding textbook connections to Chicago and Illinois history. This is no difficult task since Chicago figures prominently in most narratives on post-Civil War history, including sub topics like Gilded Age business endeavors, railroad expansion, labor unrest, Progressivism, urban politics, urban reform, the war efforts, etc. But, to connect my fall work with the recent intellectual history forum in Historically Speaking, and Daniel Wickberg's opening essay therein, I've made a concerted effort to meld intellectual history with my local history themes. Again, many Chicago historical topics aid this effort. Subjects such as the Gospel of Wealth and the Social Gospel, as well as others related to the history of education (higher, etc.), make this easy. Today I decided to devote 50 minutes to one person: John Dewey.

My method was to begin by discussing all textbook citations and mentions of Dewey (4-5 total), and then build on what was discussed. The most in-depth treatment in Out of Many consisted of a paragraph on his philosophy of education, as well as his suggested reforms, in the chapter on the Progressive Era---our current progress point in the term. I expanded by discussing five prominent themes and topics: Dewey's biography, his philosophy of education (with a minor relation to the kindergarten movement), his significance to philosophy (so, Pragmatism and Instrumentalism), his relation to politics, and Dewey's legacy.

For additional sources I consulted the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (available online), the Encyclopedia of Chicago (also available online), Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, and some online information available through the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. And of course a number of Dewey's central beliefs and philosophical contributions were simply in my memory from studying Mortimer J. Adler, Robert Hutchins, and criticisms of progressive education. One of our own, Andrew Hartman, covers these topics in his book, Education and the Cold War. For my part, as someone who has never explicitly studied Dewey's biography, and only explored Dewey's own writing in a limited way, I was amazed at how much I knew and remembered. This is due solely to Dewey's influence.

The lecture went okay. I hit all of my points, even if less thoroughly than I wanted. I should've cut out the Kindergarten movement digression. My hope on that topic was to give another on-the-ground connection between Dewey and real reform. Unfortunately it only ended up distracting me from my last two topics: his connection to politics and Dewey's legacy. Even so, the material I had pass over in relation to both amounted to less than a page. My total lecture was twelve double-spaced pages. I should've gone with eleven.

The students seemed mostly interested. I spent some unplanned time on a straw poll at the beginning of class. I asked for a show of hands on education, science, and philosophy majors. I should have asked about psychology. Between education and science majors, two-thirds of the 80 or so students present were accounted for. At every possible point in my lecture I emphasized Dewey's significance to the place and role of science in American culture. The education material spoke for itself. The first thirty minutes of lecture seemed to hold my students' attention more than the last twenty. That's natural, I suppose. But the material on politics ("democracy as a way of life"), which helps bind together Dewey's educational and philosophical concerns, received a short shrift from my ill-fated kindergarten digression and their to-be-expected lull in attention. I'll take care of that next time.

What are your experiences teaching Dewey? What has worked, or not, for you? - TL

Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field? Second Take

Following up on Andrew's excellent and comprehensive summary and analysis of the September Historically Speaking symposium on the state of the field of intellectual history, I thought I would add a few thoughts, and keep the ball rolling as we look forward to our November conference, which should ventilate all of these issues in more detail:

The excellent symposium on the state of the field holds much fascination for us (I found it engrossing), but it must be baffling to outsiders, within the discipline of history but more particularly from without. The contributors are decidedly fretful about the state of the field but there is no great theoretical or methodological controversy in dispute and the actual assessment of current conditions is quite mild: Aside from a dearth of job listings in intellectual history, there is scant evidence of a problem, as all seem to admit. Intellectual historians are being hired and are writing, many are winning awards and are prominent in the field, and there are new journals (not to mention this fabulous new blog). There even seems a consensus that the great “linguistic turn” in historical studies and the shift in disciplinary authority from intellectual history to cultural history (and the tremendous rise in importance of cultural history) has actually worked to the advantage of intellectual historians, spreading their preferred methodologies, fostering critical attention to texts and contextual analysis, and fostering the theoretical and meta-theoretical proclivities so characteristic of the intellectual historians.

What strikes me, though, is a lingering frustration at our status in the field—that cultural historians have seized the moment in a way disadvantageous to certain kinds of intellectual history, the study of “highly formalized systems of thoughts and ideas” (Wickberg), of particular thinkers and schools. Daniel Wickberg’s response is much more pointed and successful than his original essay, as he seems goaded into greater clarity and sharper formulations by his respondents. Here, he defines intellectual history as that which “foregrounds ideas, thinking, and the ways in which minds structure experience.” What really smarts is when this kind of work loses salience (although once again there seem no end of interesting titles of recent books cited by the contributors that seem to be in this vein). It is unsatisfying to me to find intellectual history being done in just about any work that considers a text or uses the “tools” of intellectual history (close reading and concern for epistemology). Good grief – what historian does not read texts closely, aside from the dustiest 1970s-vintage quantitative scholar?

Moreover, I think the defensible point of concern is not loss of status so much as a loss of purpose and ambition in the subfield of intellectual history and, here, precisely the dearth of theoretical conflict might be the point. In the famous “no directions” (to borrow McClay’s snarky line, new to me) Wingspread symposium of the 1970s, intellectual historians fretted over the marginalization of their field but also recognized a theoretical crisis, that the old way of focusing on narrow, articulate elites and such things as the climate of opinion, resulting in studies of the American Mind, or Character, or the Culture of [fill in the blank] were no longer valid or respected. Since then, of course, Theory triumphed, Cultural Studies arrived and vanquished, and many historians adorn their analysis with sophisticated allusions to the conventional nature of knowledge and the determinative force of language and often deploy theories borrowed from intellectuals rooted in affiliated disciplines—gender theorists, queer theorists, sociologists of marginality and subaltern identities and Empire, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Bourdieu, Zizek, and so forth. As Wilfred McClay points out in his remarks on the love of historians for historiography, internal theoretical debates and analyses of fights within fields (and within disciplines and within academia) are “catnip” to us but irrelevant and boring to many outside our fields (including, probably, more than a few undergraduate students) and outside academia. So, even as a kind of intellectual history as theory has triumphed, the older intellectual history as “a proxy for the study of all Americans” (David Hollinger’s phrase), dead in the 1970s, remains dead and has not been replaced. The symposiasts point out that the state of intellectual history reflects the generally fragmented state of the entire discipline: Subdivisions and specialization abound; ever more detailed scholarship flourishes; and meanwhile the parts still are not cohering, a center is difficult to find. As academic historians abdicate the discredited practice of writing syntheses generalizing about all Americans for an audience of all Americans, nationalist histories written often by popularizers about presidents and wars and the “greatest generation” fill the vacuum.

What distinguishes intellectual history, I think, is precisely its synthetic ambitions, its effort to make the mass of specialized historical research fit into a pattern that coheres. There’s plenty of reasons to scorn such efforts—the dreaded bias towards elite cultural production—yet an intellectual history predicated on the importance of ideas as something more than tools used by social actors otherwise shaped and pushed to exert “agency” trends that way. It may well be that the discipline is becoming organized by topics and not fields, but perhaps the synthesizing viewpoint, the way in which ideas are filtered throughout complex layers of cultural production and reproduction, can represent a legitimate topic. In my view, claiming intellectual authority to make such broad generalizations was part and parcel of the modernist intellectual tradition in twentieth-century America that spawned intellectual history, American Studies, and the tradition of cultural criticism represented by the now-gone and sometimes lamented “public intellectuals.” The roots of the field (what McClay calls “the longer past of the discipline”) included a kind of history that was itself social criticism, exemplified by a scholar like Christopher Lasch (never shy about broad generalizations) or, perhaps, John Patrick Diggins, whose memory will be hailed at our upcoming conference. In the 1970s and 1980s, intellectual historians seemed interested in studying communities of discourse (or interpretive communities), a more modest way of representing the field to a fragmenting discipline that was becoming more responsive to the claims of the marginalized and previously excluded. There still seems a project in writing these histories and then assessing the relative authority of such communities and seeing how they link together into a whole.

This Be The Verse

Twenty years ago, David Hackett Fischer published Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which attempts to explain U.S. political culture down to the present through the initial patterns of British immigration to North America. Historiographically, Fischer's project flowed from the twin streams of Annales School histoire totale, which was if anything losing influence at the time of the book's publication, and cultural history, which was very much on the rise. From the Annalistes, Fischer borrowed many of his interests (e.g. the longue durée; regionalism) and the scope of his project (this very hefty book announced itself as the first of a five-volume rewriting of the social and cultural history of the United States). But Fischer's approach stressed the importance of culture and ethnicity, both of which made this in-many-ways old-fashioned project seem more of its moment (though Fischer's conception of culture was itself rather anthropological and pre-"linguistic turn").*

Fischer's book was widely reviewed but got an almost universally mixed reception. Historians celebrated the audacity and ambition of the project, while questioning its details, logic, and conclusions. Charles Joyner, writing in the Journal of American Folklore, called it a "stunning but problematic achievement." Jack P. Greene, writing in the Journal of Social History, compared the book--in its extraordinary scope--to an encyclopedia, but worried that its individual components were not up to the historical standards one expects from encyclopedia entries. Darrett Rutman, reviewing the book for the American Historical Review, concluded that "Albion's Seed has borne at best questionable fruit." Albion's Seed stood as a kind of cautionary tale of the difficulties of writing total history. Though Fischer's career has continued to flourish, it has gone in other directions; the other four volumes of the project that Albion's Seed was supposed to inaugurate have never appeared.

But despite its rocky initial reception among historians, Albion's Seed has worked its way into the public discourse. Sara Robinson, co-author of the influential liberal blog Orcinus, devoted a two-part series to the book in 2007. And 2008 was a very good year for Albion's Seed. In trying to explain voting patterns during last year's protracted Democratic Presidential primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, many analysts turned to Albion's Seed and argued that Scots Irish culture in Appalachia made the region especially good for Clinton and bad for Obama (here's one random example of from The Seattle Times; googling "Scots Irish Fischer Obama" yields many others).

More recently, Albion's Seed has become a go-to explanation of what's going on with the Republican Party today. Indeed, at the time of this writing, the top-rated diary on DailyKos, the most influential Democratic blog, is "Yo, Pundits! Here's What's Up With the Republicans," which uses Albion's Seed to argue that each of the two major parties are based on two of Fischer's four ethno-regional groupings.**

(Lest anyone think that David Hackett Fischer has become the property of Democrats and progressives, it's worth noting that he was the 2006 recipient of the American Enterprise Institute's Irving Kristol Award for "notable intellectual or practical contributions to improved public policy and social welfare.")

While Albion's Seed has undoubtedly become something of a classic, I don't think that my fellow twentieth-century historians turn to it much to explain political cultural phenomena in our period. Rereading reviews from nearly two decades ago while putting together this post, I was tempted to agree with Fischer's critics about both its virtues and its flaws. Has it fared any better among historians of earlier periods of U.S. history? Or is this an example of a work of academic history that has become more read--or at least more significant--outside the profession than within it?

Perhaps Albion's Seed will do more to transform our political culture (or at least the ways that we talk about it) than it did to explain it.

___________________________________

* Albion's Seed was old-fashioned not only in its Annalistes qualities, but in its argument, which harkens back to the pre-Frederick Jackson Turner view of American history as best explained by the political traditions of the Germanic forebears of its founders.

** For those keeping score at home: Democrats = Puritans+Quakers while Republicans = Borderers+Cavaliers. Once again, the Scots Irish "Borderers" are the focus of the dKos diarist's attention.