Modern Intellectual History

Table of Contents - April 2012 - Volume 9, Issue 01  

Forum: The Present and Future of American Intellectual History

BACKWARDS TO THE FUTURE: THE CULTURAL TURN AND THE WISDOM OF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY*

DAVID D. HALLa1

a1 Harvard Divinity School E-mail: david_hall@harvard.edu

Unlike the memory of the querulous and time-bending White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, mine befits her complaint, inclined as I am to thinking backwards when asked to contemplate the state of our field. Backwards, then, I go in the first section of this essay, after a few opening comments on the situation of our field at the present moment. Thereafter, I describe the emergence of cultural history and summarize some of its strengths and weaknesses, to the end of reflecting on its implications for intellectual history.

Footnotes

* I am grateful to Ann M. Blair, Andrew Jewett, and the editors of this journal for their commentaries on previous drafts of this essay.