April 1, 2008
"The Varieties of Intellectual Experience"
In a post published last week at the U.S. Intellectual History blog, Tim Lacy writes:
Most past works of U.S. intellectual history have focused on public and private figures, institutions, and books that could in some sense be considered "canonical." I refuse to dismiss all the historians who did that work, in blanket fashion, as caring only about the elites of U.S. history. Rather, I submit to you that those historians explored, in a considered conservative fashion, what they believed others could not question as topics of inquiry. This is not to deny that race, class, and gender did not factor into those choices, but rather that definitions of what constituted regular intellectual activity affected their work. It seems to me, then, that too much consistency has been sought from historical intellectual agents by intellectual historians.
The essay continues at some length, eventually calling for an "event-based intellectual history," and is worth reading.