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WHAT IS OUR “CANON”? HOW AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORIANS DEBATE THE CORE OF THEIR FIELD*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2012

DAVID A. HOLLINGER
DAVID A. HOLLINGER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Berkeley E-mail: davidhol@berkeley.edu
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Extract

These selected excerpts from a conversation now running nearly a quarter-century about The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook exemplify the efforts made by specialists in American intellectual history to decide just what constitutes the core of their field. An anthology designed for undergraduates has practical limitations, to be sure, that prevent its table of contents from ever serving as a complete map of a field. Specific research questions, not arguments over canons, properly remain the deepest center of gravity of any cohort of scholars. But assignments to students are one important indicator of what scholar–teachers take to be important, and these assignments are not unrelated to choices these same individuals make about the topics of their monographic contributions. Hence the lively correspondence that my coeditor, Charles Capper, and I have carried on with dozens of colleagues concerning the six editions of the only collection of sources for this field currently in print offers a window on how American intellectual history has changed in the last generation and what are its current directions.

Type
Forum: The Present and Future of American Intellectual History
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 185 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Hollinger, David A. and Capper, Charles, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourceboook, 6th edn (New York, 2011)Google Scholar, following earlier editions published by the Oxford University Press in 1989, 1993, 1997, 2001, and 2006.

2 Down through the early 1960s the standard collection was a massive hardback volume edited for Lippincott by Curti, Merle, Thorp, Willard, and Baker, Carlos, American Issues: The Social Record, 4th edn (Chicago, 1960)Google Scholar. This book first appeared in 1941 and was revised and expanded in 1944, 1955, and 1960. It was designed as a partner to a collection of literary texts, American Issues: The Literary Record, edited by the same trio of scholars. Henry F. May used Social Record in the course he taught at Berkeley for twenty-eight years (assigning only a fraction of its selections), which both Capper and I audited as graduate students there in the 1960s. Another early collection was edited by Henry Steele Commager for Harper & Row, Living Ideas in America (New York, 1951). After both Social Record and Living Ideas in America were out of print, several other collections appeared and remained in print for only a few years. The most ambitious of these was edited for the Free Press by Grob, Gerald N. and Beck, Robert N., Ideas in America: Source Readings in the Intellectual History of the United States (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. All of these collections served as opening inventories of possibilities for The American Intellectual Tradition, but each of them approached the field through “snippets,” short selections from longer works enabling extensive coverage but limiting the depth with which any given text could be analyzed. Period-specific collections often offered full-text versions of classic essays, e.g. several edited by Perry Miller on the Puritans, the Transcendentalists, and the thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which were also assigned by May in his courses at Berkeley. These Miller-edited volumes helped to persuade Capper and me of the value of longer selections. Miller's American Thought: Civil War to World War I (New York, 1954) had the most influence on The American Intellectual Tradition, as detailed below.

3 For a recent, widely disseminated example of reliance on this overly general set of terms see Wills, Garry, Head and Heart: American Christianities (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

4 Miller, American Thought. Miller's forty-four-page introduction (ix–lii) to this collection, organized around the American reception of Hegel and Darwin, is a convenient example of how differently the field of American intellectual history was conceptualized in Miller's time from the way many colleagues organize their courses today.

5 I have discussed recent historiographical developments in “Thinking Is as American as Apple Pie,” Historically Speaking (Sept. 2009), 17–18; and in “American Intellectual History, 1907–2007,” in Banner, James, ed., A Century of American Historiography (New York, 2010), 21–29Google Scholar. For earlier vindications of philosophically and literarily centered visions of the field see my “Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals,” in Higham, John and Conkin, Paul, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979), 42–63Google Scholar; and “American Intellectual History: Issues for the 1980s,” Reviews in American History X (1982), 306–17.