HIS 551SEM - Intellectual in America

Historians have often examined the development of thought and culture as a series of disembodied ideas and cultural productions. An alternative approach has been to place ideas into a broader context, to explore for example, not just the philosophy of Transcendentalism, abstractly considered, but how the dramatic social, economic, cultural, and political transformation of antebellum Boston shaped Emerson¿s thinking. There is yet another approach to intellectual history, one that looks at the meaning, function, and structure of intellectual activity in America. It asks what sorts of people participated in intellectual activity at any particular time¿clergymen or laity, amateurs or experts, men or women, the few or the many. It asks in what medium intellectual work was cast¿print, script, speech¿what particular forms it assumed¿the novel or the sermon, statistics or orations¿and in the context of what, if any, kinds of intellectual and cultural institutions. It examines why intellectual authority was accorded to or assumed by these particular types of people, activities, and institutions in the first place. It considers the relationship of intellectual life to social structure and to the profit-driven market. And it considers what obstacles, practical and ideological, intellectual life in America faced. This approach, the one that forms the basis for this seminar, seeks to evaluate the historical circumstances that have shaped intellectual life and intellectual authority in America. As defined by this class, intellectual life encompasses a wide variety of pursuits, including science and the arts.

Credits: 3