Resources and Scholarship in American Intellectual History

Sources listed below are good places to start. They can help you scope out the field and get a feeling for the wide variety of subjects and approaches that engage intellectual historians.

Basics Sources, Topical and Biographical

Intellectual History Newsletter (ceased publication in 2003)

Modern Intellectual History

Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg, eds., A Companion to American Thought (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995).

John Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 24 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, 1999).

Intellectual History and the History of Intellectuals

"AHR Forum: Intellectual History," American Historical Review 97 (April 1992).

Richard Wightman Fox and Robert Westbrook, eds., In Face of the Facts: Moral Inquiry in American Scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Thomas Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: BasicBooks, 1987).

Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995).

Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989).

Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectuals (New York: Pantheon, 1994).

A Sampling of Recent Books in the Field

Adriana Benzaquén, Encounters With Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature ( Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006).

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).

Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

William Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Ellen Fitzpatrick, History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880-1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

David A. Hollinger, ed. The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion Since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006).

Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).

Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

Jill Lepore, In the Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998).

David L. Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: H. Holt, 2000).

Susan M. Lindee, Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). [Pulitzer Prize Winner in History]

Alice O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Public Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).

Christina Robb, This Changes Everything: The Relational Revolution in Psychology (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

Diana Selig, Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvare University Press, 2004).

Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000).

Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).