History 4970: American Intellectual History

Reconstruction to 1980

MW 4-5:15pm

 

Professor: Jonathan S. Coit                           e-mail: jscoit@eiu.edu

Office: Coleman 2576                                  Office Phone: 581-8575

Office Hours: 8:30-10am MW, 3-4pm F

 

This course will provide both an introduction to some of the major thinkers in American intellectual history, and to the theoretical and methodological questions which have influenced the development of the field. 

 

We will survey the philosophical and theoretical foundations of the “human sciences” beginning in the late 19th century, especially the development and criticism of biologistic methods of explaining and categorizing human difference.  We will trace the roots of these modes of thought and their broader impact on theories of democracy and modernity.  The course will end with consideration of some forms of the radical questioning of both projects (and the questioning of that questioning!) posed by intellectuals beginning in the 1960s.

 

Throughout the course we will examine the nature and importance of intellectual work as a subject of historical study.  While the course is geared towards examining writings of authors who fit neatly in commonplace definitions of the word “intellectual,” these individuals and their works yet pose ample questions about the historical enterprise.  What is the relationship between intellectuals and the social, cultural, political, and institutional contexts in which they lived and worked?  What do historians gain (and lose) by foregrounding such a context?  To what extent can intellectuals act on this context, or act independently of it?  Is there a distinctive “American” intellectual tradition, and how might such a tradition be best described? 

 

Elements of Your Grade:

Class Participation: 15%

Papers: 50% (15%, 15%, 20%)

Midterm: 15%

Final Exam: 20%

 

Attendance: Attendance is mandatory.  Excessive absences will lower your final grade for the course.

 

Class Participation: Most of the course meetings will be discussions on the week’s readings.  The participation of all students will be essential to fruitful discussion.

 

Papers: Each student will write three 8-10 page papers, one each on Souls of Black Folk, Coming of Age in Samoa, and The Culture of Narcissism.  I will hand out individual topic sheets with reading questions and a choice of topics well in advance of due dates.  I will ask that you comprehensively discuss a major aspect of each book, and set it into the larger context of American intellectuals’ debates.

 

Midterm and Final Exams: The two exams will ask students to draw connections between the disparate figures we have enountered and the different issues we have discussed.  Exams will have both a short answer and an essay section.

 

Late Work, Makeup Exams, etc.: These are at my discretion.  Students must contact me prior to due dates/exam dates for consideration. 

 

Course Readings:

Four assigned books for the course will be available at textbook rental:

David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition (4th edition), abbreviated AIT below

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

All other readings (with the exception of week 1 readings) will be available on reserve at the library.

 

Reading Schedule:

1/12

Handouts: Michel Foucault, “What is an Author”; Raymond Williams, Keywords, selections

 

1/19

AIT: William Graham Sumner, Lester Frank Ward

Reserve: Richard Hofstader, Social Darwinism in American Thought, selections

 

1/24-1/26

AIT: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams

Reserve: Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, selections

 

1/31-2/2

AIT: Josiah Royce, William James (“The Will to Believe”), George Santayana

Reserve: Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, selections

 

2/7-2/9

Du Bois, Souls

Reserve: Adolph Reed, “Du Bois and Double Consciousness”

 

2/14-2/16

AIT: Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne

Reserve: Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy

 

2/21

AIT: William James (“What Pragmatism Means”), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thorstein Veblen

Reserve: Christine Stansell, American Moderns, selections

 

2/23

Midterm Exam

 

2/28-3/2

AIT: H. L. Mencken

Reserve: Robert Park, “The City”

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, selections

 

3/7-3/9

Mead, Coming of Age

 

3/21-3/23

AIT: John Crowe Ransom, Sidney Hook

Reserve: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry”

Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, selections

 

3/28-3/30

AIT: Gunnar Myrdal

Reserve: St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis, selections

Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism, selections

 

4/4-4/6

AIT: Riehold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt

Reserve: Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, selections

 

4/11-4/13

AIT: Daniel Bell, C. Wright Mills, Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reserve: Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, selections

 

4/18-4/20

AIT: Thomas Kuhn, Susan Sontag

Reserve: Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, selections

 

4/25-4/27

Lasch, Culture of Narcissism