Thinking Is as American as Apple Pie

Daniel Wickberg's basic point that intellectual history has been largely integrated into mainstream U.S. history is eminently sound, and can serve as a caution against making too much of the issue of whether the field is neglected. Intellectual history, social history, and cultural history have all been put forward in successive historiographical moments, the proponents of each often claiming to have new insights to which old-fashioned political history was blind. Each of these forgivable conceits has left a valuable residue in the range and depth of the profession's engagement with specific sets of issues, including theways in which political history itself is carried out. Wickberg's essay, while alluding to developments in the profession beyond the field of U.S. history, is largely focused on the study of U.S. history, as my own comments will be.

With regard to the issue of "neglect," the percentage of departments offering courses labeled "intellectual history" has declined from about 80% in 1975 to about 60% in 2005, but in the meantime the percentage of departments offering courses labeled "cultural history" has increased from about 40% to about 60%. This juxtaposition, based on a study commissioned by the American Historical Association (reported in the New York Times, June 10, 2009) is worth noting given the fuzzy borders between intellectual and cultural history. Studies of the collective mentalities of publics were once loosely characterized as intellectual history, so that works such as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950) and William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee (1961) were counted as intellectual history alongside histories of argumentation, such as Perry Miller's New England Mind (1939 and 1953) and Henry F. May's The Enlightenment in America (1976). But the emergence of cultural history as a separate, yet allied field, has led to a sharpened division of labor according to which intellectual history has come to refer to a somewhat narrower range of topics than it once did, focusing more on the history of actual argumentation by people who were equipped by education and training and temperament to take the lead in making arguments—the so-called "elites." A book like Susan Nance's How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 (2009) might have been routinely classified as intellectual history if published in the 1960s, but today it is more likely to be classified as cultural history.

James Madison, from Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Vol. I, 1769-1793 (Philadelphia, 1865).

During this historiographical transformation some historians, often in the name of social history, did devalue the study of philosophy, theology, and social theory on the grounds that the ideas of elites were of little significance. But as the history of intellectuals has come to be recognized as simply one of the discipline's many subfields, rather than a proxy for the study of all Americans, this resistance is diminishing. Attention is again being paid to the history of the use of evidence and reasoning in public discourse. Thinking, rather than some esoteric activity limited to European worthies, is indeed as American as apple pie.¹ The study of popular attitudes and general political ideas held by large population groups is of course a vital part of U.S. history, but so, too, are the refinements of theorists like James Madison, the Transcendentalists, the Pragmatists, the modernization theorists, etc. To the list of works recognized as intellectual history in this somewhat narrow sense published since 2001 that Wickberg cites for having won prizes and comparable recognition in the profession at large, Iwould add Charles Capper's Margaret Fuller: The Public Years (2007), Joan Shelly Rubin's Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007), and Nils Gilman's Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2003).

Gilman, along with Sarah Igo, whom Wickberg rightly mentions, is part of a younger generation of scholars willing to try to launch careers by studying the ideas of elite intellectuals. Other recent books by this generation include Daniel Geary's Radical Ambition: C...