The story of American intellectual history's decline, fall, and phoenix-like rebirth in recent decades has become trite with the retelling: knocked from its position of prominence by the new social history and plunged into the chastened soul-searching of the famed Wingspread Conference of 1977, only to find itself rescued in part by the linguistic and cultural “turns” that swept the entire discipline of American history in the 1980s and 1990s. Like many a narrative, this one undoubtedly imposes too clear a pattern of meaning on a messier reality, but also like many a narrative, it has powerfully shaped the professional identities of American intellectual historians by giving them a sense of where they have been and how they arrived at their current place.Footnote ¹ That current place is a hospitable one, in many ways, for in the last couple of decades American historians seem to have grown increasingly receptive to the notion that ideas have mattered in history.

Yet while this narrative highlights the ways the discipline of history as a whole has changed—encapsulated in the rise of cultural history with its emphasis on meaning, discourse, and the construction of social categories—it is no less true that American intellectual historians have adapted to the new professional and disciplinary landscape in which they found themselves. This adaptation has been both invigorating and professionally necessary. It has been driven by historians following their intellectual interests but also responding to, even if only unconsciously, professional imperatives about the kind of intellectual history that “matters” or is “relevant” to the larger field. For intellectual historians, like practitioners in other subfields, must pass through the filtering processes of the job market, tenure and promotion, and grant competitions. These processes over the last quarter of a century have helped shape an intellectual history that takes an expansive approach to ideas, that follows ideas as they circulate through cultures and over time, and that situates ideas and their reception in a variety of diverse contexts. The result might be characterized as a move from a concern with the history of ideas to an acknowledgement of the pervasiveness and significance of ideas in history.

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Perhaps the simplest way to define what intellectual historians do is to say that they read texts in historical context. Yet this is to say almost nothing, because what it leaves unsaid—obscures in its very simplicity—is how flexible and open-ended those two terms have been.Footnote ² Just as historians have expanded how they think about ideas, they have sought to locate those ideas in an increasingly broad range of texts and to understand them in different contexts. A future intellectual historian examining the five successive editions of the sourcebook American Intellectual Tradition, edited by David Hollinger and Charles Capper, could tell one version of this story, as that “tradition” has been expanded to include voices previously unheard or ignored as not serious. This expansion is perhaps one of the clearest ways that the subfield has been transformed by the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s that marked intellectual history as elitist and irrelevant. The most obvious example is the canonization of Frederick Douglass and Margaret Fuller, whose absence from a survey of nineteenth-century American intellectual history would be unthinkable today. Other evidence of this expansion can be seen in the development of a rich body of scholarship in African American intellectual history in the past decades.Footnote ³ What has been called a distinct “women's intellectual history” is also coming into view.Footnote ⁴ The last five or six years have seen as well the appearance of a handful of works on Asian American intellectual history and Native American intellectual history.Footnote ⁵

This new inclusivity has not necessarily involved displacement, though the limited space in an anthology or a course syllabus always imposes some process of selection. It is not that historians used to read James Madison and now read Judith Sargent Murray, or they used to study the Unitarians and now study African American social scientists. The Madison (or William James or Jonathan Edwards) industry still appears to be thriving. This is also not simply a story of addition, in the old “minorities-and-women-contributed-too” formulation. Ultimately, the expansion of voices contributing to the “American intellectual tradition” (to use Hollinger and Capper's phrase) changes our understanding of that very tradition and even some of the more established voices within it. So we have learned, for example, that a whole roster of African Americans throughout the nineteenth century argued with Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, or we understand Transcendentalism differently the more we recognize Margaret Fuller's role therein.

Another point about this inclusivity/expansion is that it is only partly novel. American intellectual history—in contrast perhaps to its European counterpart—has always had a fairly ecumenical approach to texts. The subfield emerged not simply as a history of ideas or even as a history of intellectuals, but as a history of thought broadly construed. Classic books in the field consulted a broad array of sources and read multiple texts in conversation with multiple others. This early work, often carried out under the rubric of “intellectual and social history,” represented a broad-spectrum approach to the importance of ideas in history.Footnote ⁶

One can see this in the truly eclectic reading of sources in Merle Curti's The Growth of American Thought (1943); in the well-known essays by John Higham on “boundlessness and consolidation” in the 1850s and the “reorientation of American culture in the 1890s”; or in David Brion Davis's first book, which placed novels by Melville and Hawthorne side by side with the pulpier works of George Lippard.Footnote ⁷ A few examples from closer to our own day are perhaps even more revealing. David Hall shifted his focus from the thought of the clergy to the laity in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (1989). Daniel Rodgers's The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1865–1920 (1978) quoted the novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps as freely as the economist David A. Wells. In short, American intellectual historians have never been focused exclusively on an agreed-upon and limited number of texts. The examples above demonstrate that scholars have just as readily devoted their energies to exploring social values, beliefs, attitudes, and ideology as to tracing out the work of more developed and systematic thought.

This is only one strand of the subfield and I do not mean to privilege it here. That strand more explicitly focused on intellectuals—or at least on those Americans who have been self-consciously reflective and systematic in their thinking—has relied on more conventional texts. Perry Miller's now iconic study of New England Puritans drew primarily on sermons; Bruce Kuklick's investigation of the Harvard philosophy department relied largely on his subjects’ published works. Recent historians have, of course, continued to mine canonical texts but because of their emphasis on the impact, transmission, and reception of ideas they have worked to locate and map the extended conversations of thinkers both across society and through time. One might think here of Wilfred McClay's The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994); Jeffrey Sklansky's The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (2002); Nicholas Guyatt's Providence and the Invention of the United States (2007); and Bruce Dain's A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (2002), all of which rely primarily on published, formal writing of one sort or another.Footnote ⁸

Responding in part to the larger disciplinary emphasis on ambitious research agendas, intellectual historians have also moved aggressively to the archive in recent decades, where they have mined published and unpublished correspondence, diaries, notebooks, academic papers, magazine writing, lectures, white papers, blue books, and on and on. Good examples would include James Kloppenberg's Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Social Thought, 1870–1920 (1986) and Daniel Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), as well as such comprehensive intellectual biographies as James Turner's The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (1999); Charles Capper's Margaret Fuller: The Public Years (2007); and Dean Grodzin's American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (2002), which seem to have tracked down every last textual scrap related to their subjects.

One development that exemplifies a contribution that intellectual historians are uniquely well suited to make is the intersection of formal thought with the reflective life of nonformal thinkers. Amy Dru Stanley's From Bondage to Contract offered one model of this, asking how liberal contract theory played out after emancipation, once Americans determined that human beings could no longer be bought and sold. She focuses on a range of texts produced not by formal theorists but by men and women she calls “practical philosophers”—or people “who were not philosophers but who meditated on philosophical themes while encountering conditions outside the world of ideas.”Footnote ⁹

Scholarship on the history of reading—on what, how, and why people read and what their reading meant to them—has opened up a whole new world that has not been nearly as well exploited by intellectual historians as it has by social or cultural historians. A couple of works demonstrate the possibilities of this approach for intellectual history. Thomas Augst's The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003) examines upwardly mobile business clerks in 1840s New York City and finds in their diaries evidence that, under the influence of Emerson's lectures and writings, they became practitioners of philosophy as the “art of living.” Joan Shelley Rubin's exhaustively researched Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007)—a study that surveys debates among poets and literary critics while also exploring how generations of Americans have encountered and used poetry throughout their lives—provides an excellent recent model for intellectual historians interested in the migration and translation of ideas.Footnote ¹⁰

Visual texts offer a whole other category that might receive more attention from intellectual historians in the future. Here again, this is not exactly novel, as older historians such as Michael Kammen or John Kasson have routinely included readings of painting and other arts in their work. Neil Harris's contribution to the 1977 Wingspread Conference noted the reluctance of intellectual historians to engage visual sources, and this has been a lacuna that scholars in cultural studies have been more than happy to fill. Some real opportunities exist for enriching our understanding of how ideas moved through culture, which intellectual historians should seize. For example, Robert Westbrook has offered an intriguing reading of Norman Rockwell's World War II paintings, published in the Saturday Evening Post. While historians have used these now-iconic images to discuss homefront mobilization or the centrality of domesticity to national self-understanding, what Westbrook did was to read the paintings for how they revealed wartime conceptualization of the problem of liberal political obligation. Steven Conn's History's Shadow: Native American and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (2004) uses paintings as an index of Americans’ historical awareness, and specifically the way Native Americans figured therein. Caroline Winterer's Mirror of Antiquity examines early American painting and consumer objects for evidence of white women's engagement in classical learning and even political debates over simplicity, refinement, and luxury. As Winterer has argued, these visual texts suggest “a way for historians to flesh out the intellectual history of early national women, showing how they could participate in a conversation about modern politics and classical antiquity from which we have assumed they were largely disbarred.” Finally, Linda Gordon's new work on the New Deal photographer Dorothea Lange as a kind of “visual intellectual” offers another promising instance of the way visual texts might be read for the ideas they convey.Footnote ¹¹

Some of this work may seem to fall more clearly into the category of cultural history rather than intellectual history. The lines between them can be quite blurry, as both subfields concern themselves with the beliefs, attitudes, and preoccupations that have marked past societies. I am not particularly interested in drawing sharp distinctions or walling off intellectual history from other approaches. What I am trying to highlight here is a distinctive contribution that intellectual historians can make. The works mentioned above concern themselves with the ideas that have long occupied the attention of intellectual historians: freedom, selfhood, equality, liberalism, race, virtue, democracy. Further, these works foreground ideas and require the knowledge and training of the intellectual historian in order to do well. Even the works that seem most loosely “cultural” here do not signal the abandonment of systematic thought—or of ideas—but an attempt to put that thought in conversation with broader cultural currents, to see what happens to ideas as they move and flit about, subject to various readings, and misreadings, by diverse audiences.Footnote ¹² The benefits of this kind of work are many. It forces historians to see ideas as contested and active in culture, to uncover how ideas have structured Americans’ response to their world, and to grapple with how and why some ideas gain traction at certain historical moments while others do not. Yet there may be potential costs as well, as this approach privileges ideas that did have broad reception and risks insufficient attention to difficult or particularly nuanced ideas.

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To move from text to context may help throw into sharper relief some of the recent developments I am charting here. As historians, we invoke “context” with such ritualistic frequency that we do not always focus on the different things we actually mean by it. A text itself can form its own context, as in the coherent whole made up of separate parts (i.e. to read a passage “in context”). This kind of contextualizing is what all careful readers do, and literature scholars and intellectual historians who interpret complex texts do in more systematic ways. But historians go beyond this to weave many texts together and to connect those texts to the circumstances of their production and reception. Contexts are nearly infinite: linguistic, economic, rhetorical, institutional, biographical, social, political, international. Intellectual historians have situated their work in any number of these, though, as Anthony Grafton has recently commented, not always with the critical reflection and self-consciousness we might. Some of the ways American intellectual historians have thought about context in recent years helps explain the new prominence of the subfield.Footnote ¹³

Except for the most “internalist” of works, American intellectual historians have always rooted their ideas in some kind of social or political context, so much so that certain work (e.g. by Vernon Parrington or Richard Hofstadter) could at times be fairly reductive in making ideas seem little more than functions of socioeconomic or political status. But in the past couple of decades we have seen an increased emphasis on the political, or at least public, contexts of intellectuals and ideas. This likely reflects a response to charges of intellectual history's elitism and irrelevance in the 1970s, which historians could deflect by demonstrating the public orientation or political significance of the various figures and ideas they studied. I am not suggesting that historiographical or professional imperatives determined scholarly interests, but the kinds of topic historians (and students) were drawn to in the 1980s and 1990s did work in tandem with larger changes in the discipline. Out went the alienated and withdrawn, in came the engaged and public-oriented (as the relative decline of interest in a figure such as Henry Adams shows). The renewed historical interest in American Pragmatism in the 1980s and 1990s, though part of a broader intellectual shift, is surely one piece of this story.Footnote ¹⁴

For whatever precise reason, an insistence on placing ideas and intellectuals in their “public” contexts seems to be a prominent feature of recent scholarship. This has become perhaps clearest in twentieth-century work where scholars have shown the role intellectuals and/or ideas have played in social policy and foreign policy. Daniel Rodgers, John Carson, and Sarah Igo have, in quite different ways, tracked how social scientists and social-scientific ways of thinking have influenced debates over welfare, intelligence, and what it means to be “average.” The scholarship surrounding foreign policy is equally extensive. Paul Kramer has demonstrated the uses to which anthropological knowledge was put in the Philippines. Nils Gilman and David Engerman have tracked the influence that modernization theory has had in foreign-policy circles, while Elizabeth Borgwardt has attempted to read into postwar American internationalism a commitment to human rights. These works are not for the most part about the role specific intellectuals played in politics, but about how knowledge gets created and how ideas get disseminated and “operationalized.”Footnote ¹⁵

Though clearest in the twentieth century, this new concern with the public contexts of intellectuals and ideas obtains in the nineteenth century as well. Emerson historiography presents one of the more dramatic examples of this thrust, as scholars such as Len Gougeon and Albert Von Frank and others have worked to rescue the significance of the reformer-Emerson (the abolitionist, the woman suffragist) from the quietism of the Sage-of-Concord-Emerson. The concept of the “public intellectual” gave historians a new vocabulary in the 1990s. And not only Emerson, but Margaret Fuller, Mark Twain, William James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others have all received treatment as public intellectuals. The specifics of the context vary a good deal from study to study, but an emphasis on the “public” nature of intellectual life seems central, though the generic nature of that term can often obscure the reality of different publics.Footnote ¹⁶

Much of this emphasis on the public-oriented nature of intellectual life, at least for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seems to grow out of a cluster of scholarly developments centered on the history of “print culture” (a branch of history of the book) and the Habermasian concept of the “public sphere.” Attention to print and circuits of communication added new ways to contextualize writers and thinkers and led to an explosion of works in the 1980s and 1990s by historians and literary scholars. Thinking about print shaped scholars’ approach to political debate, national identity, and the racial and gendered components of the “Republic of Letters.” Considering the literary marketplace in which writers published their works raised questions of access, payment, audience, competition, circulation, and diffusion. Scholars have done a staggering amount of work on the material side of things, the technological and business particulars of printing, publishing, and distributing. They have also raised crucial questions for the practice of intellectual history. The production and distribution aspects of this work have recently been synthesized in the phenomenally comprehensive five-volume The History of the Book in America, but there is still much work for intellectual historians to do. Who gets to participate in public debate and on what terms do they do so? How influential have key ideas or texts been in any given moment, and when and why do certain ideas or texts gain (or lose) cultural traction? How did readers encounter specific texts and in what ways and by what factors were those encounters mediated?

The history of reading can allow us to access the mental world of ordinary Americans, but the same interpretive techniques have been enormously helpful for how we think of intellectuals—both what they read and who read them. This approach has long been employed in works by intellectual biographers, who did not need a history of reading to see that what their subjects read was important. Yet intellectual historians generally do not seem to have exploited this body of scholarship as well as literary and cultural historians have. Michael O'Brien, in Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (2004), uses publication and reading to help reconstruct the intellectual life of southern thinkers and to present them as engaged with a broader world of Atlantic thought. What Emerson read and who read him are crucial to the interpretive thrust of Lawrence Buell's Emerson (2003). Focusing on reading and print might enable historians to see intellectual networks they might otherwise miss if they do not appear in more conventionally established places (e.g. through institutions or personal correspondence). Attending explicitly to the technologies of communication and distribution can help historians follow ideas as they get launched into the world and migrate into new and different settings where they might fall flat, get modified, or be mobilized into the service of unexpected ends.

Distinct from the effort to place ideas and intellectuals in public contexts but still relevant to the topic of the new receptivity to ideas in history has been the move beyond the national towards larger transnational contexts. This development—part of the larger “internationalization of American history”—has been as significant and pervasive as any in recent historiography, though it bears pointing out that studying ideas in transnational contexts can be traced back at least to Arthur O. Lovejoy. Today it has become almost mandatory to treat colonial and early American intellectual and cultural life as part of a larger Atlantic world. Nicholas Guyatt's Providence and the Invention of the United States and Sarah Knott's Sensibility and the American Revolution (2009) bear this out.

This Atlantic context may be less mandatory for the mid- to late nineteenth century, but the impulse to trace ideas across borders and oceans is still very much there. Areas of nineteenth-century intellectual life that scholars “always” knew had transatlantic components—abolition, racial thought, Transcendentalism, liberalism—have received much more serious and thorough treatment on these terms. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart recently edited a volume of essays, Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (2007), that provides new insights into the connected histories of abolitionism and feminism, as they emerged in the United States, France, Germany, and Britain. Philip Gura's American Transcendentalism: A History (2007) contains two chapters on the engagement with European ideas, and Lawrence Buell makes Emerson's “cosmopolitanism” a central organizing principle of his biography. Similarly, James Turner's biography of Charles Eliot Norton foregrounds the transatlantic, while Charles Capper reconstructs not just the early literary cosmopolitanism of the young Margaret Fuller but the lived revolutionary transnationalism of the later Fuller in Europe.

Mapping the transatlantic context of ideas has opened up American intellectual life in tremendously exciting ways, though intellectual historians might want to be more explicit about what they gain and what they may lose with this expanded frame. For any context involves gains and losses: a weaving of some threads to reveal one braid of meaning, while letting other, neglected threads dangle limply by the side. The gains seem clear enough at this point. Thinking in transatlantic and transnational contexts has enabled American intellectual historians to reconstruct more accurately the intellectual world of the nineteenth century which clearly was not bound nationally even at moments (e.g. the Civil War) when national issues preoccupied Americans.

As the move toward transnational and global studies pervades the entire discipline of American history right now, one can only imagine that future intellectual historians will continue to root their work in these larger contexts. Indeed, recent trends forecast greater internationalization and different ways to place American intellectual history in global contexts outside the northern Atlantic that has thus far been most prevalent. Caribbean, hemispheric, and Pacific contexts beckon future intellectual historians, especially those working on racial diasporas and imperial knowledge. The question of context need not be an either/or one, and many scholars try to keep multiple contexts in view, as in Michael O'Brien's attempt, in Conjectures of Order, to place southern intellectuals simultaneously in national, imperial, and postcolonial contexts. Yet in the effort to contextualize transnationally or even globally, surely some aspects of local and national contexts risk misunderstanding or neglect. Joan Rubin's call for attention to the local might be joined by a reaffirmation of the national, a perspective that historical actors, as much as they inhabited transnational worlds, would surely recognize.Footnote ¹⁷

Finally, one other context helps to explain the recent receptiveness intellectual history has found, and may continue to find, in the larger discipline of American history: that is, our own and the continually changing context in which future American intellectual historians will find themselves. The fact that the present shapes the questions we ask about the past is no less true for intellectual history than it is for any other subfield—hence, for example, the surge of impressive work on antislavery thought in the 1960s, the revived interest in Pragmatism and social democracy at the end of the Cold War, the recent attention to conservatism and American interest in Islam and the Middle East, and the persistent effort beginning in the 1960s to understand the meaning of race which is very much still under way in “the age of Obama.” Attending to the present context, recognizing that it has been shaped by ideas that have histories in need of interrogation and explanation, offers American intellectual historians an opportunity to maintain their importance in the larger discipline. Yet in so doing, intellectual historians must use their training and interpretive methods to insist on the pastness of past ideas as well—to counter glib assumptions of continuity or genealogy by offering close, careful readings of ideas as they emerged, moved about, and worked in history.Footnote ¹⁸