Early American Intellectual History After Perry Miller

Bibliographic Data

ID8894900
AuthorsBruce Tucker (corresponding author)
Year1982
Volume13
Issue2
Pages145-158
Publication date1982-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3138/cras-013-02-01
OpenAlexW2034174105
LanguageEN
References cited30

It is one of the pecular ironies of current American historiography that intellectual historians have turned increasingly from writing the history of ideas to writing about the history of ideas.1 During the 1940s and 1950s intel- lectual historians such as Merle Curti, Ralph Gabriel, Richard Hofstadter and Perry Miller led the profession away from the economic determinism of the Progressive historians toward a new synthesis which emphasized political consensus and the unity and uniqueness of the American past.2 The preemi- nence of the history of ideas, however, was short lived. A near revolution in methodology during the 1960s elevated social history to the cutting edge of the profession and precipitated the demise of intellectual history as a coherent field. Intellectual historians have now begun to join their colleagues in turn- ing to the social sciences—psychology, sociology and anthropology—to rejuvenate the field, and they are writing more frequently about the history of ideas in order to evaluate the work which has relied on methodologies from other disciplines.3 Whereas earlier intellectual historians aspired to a literary mastery of their sources, their successors have become obsessed with method and technique

Art · Demise · Economic history · Field (mathematics · Historiography · History of literature · Intellectual history · Literature · Miller · Order (exchange · Political history · Political science · Politics · Social history (medicine · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Law · Philosophy, History, and Historiography