A Commercial Republic: Democratic Capitalism in American Thought

I am very pleased to announce that one of our own, Mike O'Connor, the 2011 S-USIH Conference Committee Chair, has received an advance contract from the University Press of Kansas, to publish his book, A Commercial Republic: Democratic Capitalism in American Thought. Expect to see Mike's book on shelves sometime in 2013. I had the honor of reading large portions of the manuscript. I think it will make big waves. Congratulations Mike!

Society for U.S. Intellectual History Executive Committee Annual Meeting

Dear S-USIH Members:

I am preparing for the our first annual Society for U.S. Intellectual History Executive Committee Meeting. As such, I am soliciting suggestions for meeting agenda items. If you have any, please send me an email: ahartma [at] ilstu [dot] edu. The agenda will be circulated to all members later in the week.

The business meeting is Thursday, November 17, 9:00-10:30 a.m. (C197).

Eran Shalev Responds to Varad Mehta

Eran Shalev is an associate professor of history at Haifa University, Israel. The following is a guest post by Shalev in response to Varah Mehta's review of Rome Reborn.

An author, as we know, has little control over a book once it reaches its audience. But an author should, I believe, attempt to rectify a gross misreading of his work. For this reason I address two of Varad Mehta’s claims in his review of Rome Reborn on Western Shores.

Mehta attributes to me unusual claims to the extreme, namely that revolutionary Americans “thought not only that they could emulate Brutus, but that the ‘American Brutus’ would actually be the Brutus, resurrected 1,800 years later”; not less bizarre is the assertion that I imply that the numerous Americans who were using classical pseudonyms wished to hoax their readers into believing that they were reading texts about America written by actual classical Romans. “Even to suggest that,” Mehta writes, “is to make fools and dupes out of the Americans, who knew perfectly well that such a possibility was nonsense…it also makes Hamilton, Madison, and Jay [who wrote the Federalist as the Roman “Publius”] look like fools for believing they could trick their readers into believing it (177).”

new book

After reading this New Republic review (located behind a paywall), I am so excited about Richard White's new(ish) book on the building of the transcontinental railroad that I cannot stand it. Apparently, White challenges the popular understanding of the transcontinentals to argue that they were built for political rather than economic reasons, that their railroad magnate founders were not only cruel but incompetent, and that their raison d'être was bilking the federal government. Sounds pretty great to me! The book was also reviewed in the New York Times by Michael Kazin, who will sit on the Friday panel on American exceptionalism at the upcoming S-USIH conference.

A Big Tent

I very much appreciate the discussion that has taken place over the last week or so about women in US Intellectual History. I am grateful to know that everyone agrees that S-USIH should be a place of welcome and openness to everyone who does intellectual history. 

Three members of the membership committee had a meeting just yesterday to discuss how to encourage more members to join our society, conference, and blog. We thought of specific, concrete strategies to grow our audience and especially active members. We will present this at the executive meeting on November 17, but I would be glad to hear further suggestions. I was encouraged to see Mary Ellen Lennon’s post, in part, because hers is a new voice adding to the dynamism of our conversation. 

I wanted to clarify something and ask a further question. Yes, my original post was about my feelings and my experiences, but it was meant as a starting point for a broader conversation, and in that way it was a success. I haven’t studied the place of gender in US Intellectual History. That was why I was so careful to explain that I was only speaking from the point of view of one woman. I’d also like to point out that many identity based analysis is grounded in individuals’ feelings. I attempted to explain what I had experienced, what I felt about it and why, and give possible interpretations that were and were not based in identity. 

I value this community and its pursuit of a newly invigorated field of US Intellectual History. I am often inspired by how much this group has accomplished in a half decade. 

Finally, I would like to try to redirect the conversation toward some of Michelle Moravec’s concrete insights and ask if others have insights or answers they would like to share. Moravec wrote

Ok so my side project last year was a book about online communities of mothers. Thinking with that knowledge of gendered online comm theory a few things stick out

1. you have to "join" the FB page, which is limiting
2. some people are "added" by others, which creates a sense of "insiderness"
3. from the quick skim it seems that discussion is tilted towards bigger thinkers, political discourse oriented intellectual history, which is fine, but as has been noted, if one is not an "expert" on those people one might not be inclined to pipe up
4. on the other hand the tone is highly civil, which I would think would encourage participation by new people

The numbers of the responses to my original post and to Mary Ellen Lennon’s response indicates that this is a topic of great importance to our community.  I’d like to use David’s concept of the Big Tent to ask, in a concrete and productive way, how we plan to create that structure and encourage the diversity within it.

Du Bois 50th Anniversary Commemorative Conference

Please post and forward to all lists.

Call for Papers, Panels & Posters

W. E. B. Du Bois 50th Anniversary Commemorative Conference

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Wings of Atlanta:

A Commemorative Conference at Clark Atlanta University

The year 2013 will mark the 50th anniversary of the passing of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois. On his birthday in February of that year, it is fitting that Clark Atlanta University (CAU) celebrate his life and scholarship: Dr. Du Bois wrote his most influential works in the 23 years he spent as a professor at Atlanta University. Serving as faculty of the Departments of History and Economics, he taught at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910, and then returned from 1934 to 1944 as chair of the Department of Sociology. Dr. Du Bois also had impact in the area of social work and as a novelist, poet and short story writer. The W.E.B. Du Bois and the Wings of Atlanta Conference will serve as a meeting at the crossroads of various paths of Du Bois’s work. Conference participants will engage in an interdisciplinary and international introspection of the life, scholarship and activism of one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century. 

Testing a New Society for an Old Problem

The following is a guest post from Mary Ellen Lennon, a new member of S-USIH and a chair and commentator for the 2011 conference.

The email heralded the auspicious news: the reception of my 40.00 check makes me an official dues-paying (if not card carrying) member of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Coupled with a welcoming email from Delta confirming my flight to NYC, it looks like I am just one unpacked bag away from throwing myself into your community of scholars. But I find myself pausing—a pair of socks in hand—in the wake of the 42 message string commenting on the “Where are all the women?” post.

Book Review: Varad Mehta on Shalev's *Rome Reborn on Western Shores*

Review of Eran Shalev's Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). ISBN 0-8139-2833-3. Pp. xiii, 311. $45.00.

Varad Mehta
Independent Scholar

Scratch an American of the Revolutionary era and underneath you’ll find a Roman. That impression has been long conveyed by a robust scholarship exploring the myriad influences of classical culture on eighteenth-century British North America and the Revolution of its inhabitants against their colonial mother.[1] Especially successful in scholarly circles has been the argument that the primary ideology of the Revolution was a strand of republicanism whose genealogy can be traced back to classical Greece and Rome by way of Machiavelli.[2] Eran Shalev unites the histories of the classics and republicanism in the revolutionary era in order to argue that classical antiquity “played a crucial role in articulating the revolutionaries’ quarrel and their coming to terms with history and time” (3). While Shalev does an excellent job explicating the influence of classical conceptions of time and history in this period, he is less successful in demonstrating that these were the primary, let alone the only, inspirations for the revolutionary generation’s understanding of them. The result is a book which, typical of those in the so-called republican paradigm, must make its case by ignoring the most important aspects of the Revolution, in particular the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Shalev divides his study into six chapters, each exploring a specific aspect of his theme.

Zizek: Always Ask the Right Questions!

Highly recommended viewing: Charlie Rose's recent interview of Slavoj Zizek.

The two points of the interview I liked the most:

1) When Zizek says the role of the philosopher is to ask the right questions.

2) Zizek's bemusement at Rose's characterization of the Arab Spring as non-ideological. This was precisely the ideological move that Zizek unmasked in his classic 1988 book The Sublime Object of Ideology (still my favorite Zizek).