Suchergebnisse

If one Googles "Wingspread" a vast number of conference titles covering all manner of topics will fill the screen: from Fire-Rescue Service Stakeholders to Endocrine Disruptors, from Domestic Violence to Civic Responsibilities of Research. Of more interest to intellectual historians was the conference on the future of American intellectual history held at the Wingspread Conference Center in 1977. Over forty years the "Wingspread conference" and the book that came out of it has echoed through the field. Neither the conference nor the book that emerged from it, New Directions in American Intellectual History, edited by John Higham and Paul Conkin, was a celebration of the field. It focused on a collective crisis of confidence, particularly among the more senior scholars. The heart of the matter at the conference was the perceived challenge of social history, a social history that fancied itself "scientific" and more rigorous than intellectual history. There was fear that this movement in the profession was marginalizing a field that had flourished for a couple of generations.

Thomas Bender's 2009 essay "Can National History Be De-Provincialized? U.S. History Textbook Controversies in the 1940s and 1990s," originally published in Contexts: The Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, asks the important question of how a nation-specific curriculum in history—that is, how "American" history itself—can be taught with the least influence of political factions and the least interference of commercial factors, in light of the fact that both elements, the political and the commercial, have played a role in the construction of the US history textbook. Bender's essay demonstrates the complexity of the problem as multiple stakeholders seek to control, limit, or promote particular elements of the narratives of US history. Professional historians, Bender argues, like history itself, have "no responsibility to supply comfort"—that is, no role in promoting nationalism or American exceptionalism—yet he also warns that, due to changes in the textbook industry, they also may have little role in determining what is finally published. Bender's essay, which specifically discusses the impact of political conditions—World War II, for example—on the daily practice of teaching and writing about history, serves as an insightful reminder of the complexity and vulnerability of a nation's memory.

When I entered graduate school in the fall of 1966, planning to study American intellectual history and perhaps intellectuals specifically, all the talk among the more advanced graduate students was a recently published book, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965), by Christopher Lasch. I read it eagerly, but I was not sure what to make of it. The author, Christopher Lasch, offered a very complex analysis of intellectuals' lives and their social location—or lack of it. It gave as much space to their psychological needs as to their ideas. That seemed to diminish them. Just what did he intend? I wondered.

The following essays present six distinct but broadly compatible narratives of scholarship in United States intellectual history over the past half-century: postwar dominance, a season of despair, and then the field's rise, transformation, and expansion. The essays are a feast of erudition; any reader will come away from them with a list of "must-read" books. But there is much more here. These are rigorous and sophisticated explorations—at once historical and prescriptive—of a flourishing field. The writers span different generations, with authors representative of older, middling, and younger scholars. These appraisals are various yet they are unambiguously within the mainstream, tracking the current understandings of the somewhat fuzzy boundaries of the field. While additional writers might have further enriched the coverage, these writers together offer a fair representation of current practice in the field.

This article examines two incidents of textbook controversy in the United States in the course of the last half-century. First, it addresses history's historical relationship to the modern nation-state and nationalism. How does that relationship, and the particular way it is understood, limit the boundaries of history, particularly the contest over whether American history ought to be taught as selfcontained and exceptionalist or taught within a larger global context? Second, it addresses the presence of what could be called a historical essentialism or even historical fundamentalism in textbook controversies. The article concludes with an examination of the increasingly political character of the textbook approval and adoption process, as well as the role of publishers and professional historians in the process.