This article examines Mary Wollstonecraft's public reception in American newspapers from 1800 to 1869. Wollstonecraft was portrayed to the American public as a philosopher of women's rights, a new model of femininity, and a pioneer of women's political activism. Although these iconic uses of Wollstonecraft were regularly negative, they grew more positive as the women's rights movement gained steam alongside the abolition movement.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel by Kevin J. HayesMatthew LeggattKevin J. Hayes. The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. E-book, 192 pp. ISBN 9780192670960.Kevin J. Hayes is a writer of high regard, having published many books over his distinguished career, including biographical studies such as Herman Melville, (...) Mark Twain, George Washington: A Life in Books, and several on Edgar Allen Poe. Works like the 2020 monograph Shakespeare and the Making of America showcase his intersecting interests in biography, literature, and American political history. It is these interests that are very much on display in his 2022 monograph The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel, and we should be thankful that Hayes has turned his attention to the subject of utopian fiction as he certainly has much to add to the discussion. The book is clearly a labor of love and Hayes writes with a great degree of detail and authority suggesting he has always held a deep interest in the utopian novel. In fact, from the preface, it is clear the research supporting this book has spanned many years.The preface sets it all up very neatly. Immediately, the reader is invited into the research story of the book. Hayes has an evocative and methodical style that carries that research throughout. The author is also careful in this preface to assert his expertise in the field. Having read “virtually every utopian novel in American literature published before 1910” on microfilm gives Hayes the opportunity to explore many of the obscure and lesser-known works of the period (ix), which he notes in his introduction is primarily between 1880 and 1915. Since many of these novels are yet to be digitized, his insight is notably rare.Aside from an introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into five chapters. The first is titled “The Residential Library” and is centrally about [End Page 601] books in home-spaces, from personal libraries to books on shelves in someone’s living room. Chapter 2, “The Public Library,” explores depictions of public libraries and ways that collected knowledge might be organized and made accessible in utopian visions. “The Idea of Authorship,” chapter 3, is about the professional/amateur status of authors in utopian societies. In this section, Hayes also explores ideas about literary quality and attempts to answer concerns that a utopian age would necessarily be incapable of producing great literature. Chapter 4, titled “The Newspaper,” details the struggles utopian authors have had with the newspaper format. Finally, “The Printed Page and the Written Word” examines ways in which utopian authors sought to refine the printed and written word and their innovative suggestions in this area. Each of these chapters opens by considering Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward in relation to the subject at hand and Bellamy’s 1888 novel is referred to extensively throughout The Future of the Book, offering a frame for Hayes’s exploration of utopian literature’s inner dialogue with the printed word.In his introduction, Hayes highlights that much of the scholarly work in this area has focused on dystopias. Indeed, when I think about the representation of literature in speculative fiction I tend, first, to think of the great dystopias like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which history is erased and rewritten by The Party, or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which books are considered dangerous and thus are rigorously hunted and burned by the ironically named Firemen of the future. Alternatively, postapocalyptic movies spring to mind. Taking shelter in the New York Public Library, Sam Hall (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) frantically burns books for warmth despite the protests of several other characters in Roland Emmerich’s 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. Likewise, in “Marooned” (1989), an episode of the British SF sitcom Red Dwarf (1988–), of which I was particularly fond during my formative years, a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare is burned to keep the last remaining human, David Lister (played by Craig Charles), alive. In the opposite direction, some postapocalyptic... (shrink)

In The Social History of Ideas in Quebec, 1760-1896, Yvan Lamonde traces the province's political and intellectual development from the British Conquest to the election of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. From the individuals who formulated them, to the networks in which they circulated, to their reception, Yvan Lamonde focuses on ideas at work and their role in shaping Quebec history. The mapping of a complete intellectual circuit allows Lamonde to follow the strains of ideological debates - monarchism, liberalism, (...) republicanism, democracy, revolution, ultramontanism, nationalism - over more than a century. His work is informed by an encyclopaedic reading of the print culture of the period and the book conveys a profound and nuanced knowledge of the social context and cultural channels - educational institutions, newspapers, the book trade - in which intellectual debate occurred. Lamonde argues that while these ideas concerned politics, they went beyond the political: they were a fundamental and everyday element of civic society that was expressed in the public sphere through pamphlets, the popular press, and sermons. Lamonde's scrutiny of public opinion in Quebec allows him to place such currents of thought in the colony's international context: that of France, England, Rome, the United States, and their respective metropolises. The Social History of Ideas in Quebec, 1760-1896 covers a volatile time in the province's history - from the end of the French Regime through the American invasion, the War of 1812, and the Rebellions in Lower Canada - capturing the cultural ascension of a society and the foundations of Quebec identity. (shrink)

Matthew Lavine’s The First Atomic Age is intended as a corrective to what has by now become a familiar story of postwar US nuclear culture. The popular enthusiasm for and fear of all things nuclear, as described in such works as Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light , was not in fact a new development but rather a repeat of a phenomenon that first manifested half a century earlier. Working with newspapers, magazines, trade journals, advertisements, product labels, pulp (...) fiction, poetry, and scientific biography, Lavine unequivocally demonstrates the ubiquity of references to both X-rays and radiation in popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This, he argues, constitutes the “First Atomic Age”.Lavine divides the book into three long chapters according to how much the public might reasonably know about radiation and radioactivity. In the first period, the era of discovery, the lack of con .. (shrink)

Detailed summary in vernacular field only.

The success of movies like The Artist and Hugo recreated the wonder and magic of silent film for modern audiences, many of whom might never have experienced a movie without sound. But while the American silent movie was one of the most significant popular art forms of the modern age, it is also one that is largely lost to us, as more than eighty percent of silent films have disappeared, the victims of age, disaster, and neglect. We now know (...) about many of these cinematic masterpieces only from the collections of still portraits and production photographs that were originally created for publicity and reference. Capturing the beauty, horror, and moodiness of silent motion pictures, these images are remarkable pieces of art in their own right. In the first history of still camera work generated by the American silent motion picture industry, David S. Shields chronicles the evolution of silent film aesthetics, glamour, and publicity, and provides unparalleled insight into this influential body of popular imagery. Exploring the work of over sixty camera artists, Still recovers the stories of the photographers who descended on early Hollywood and the stars and starlets who sat for them between 1908 and 1928. Focusing on the most culturally influential types of photographs—the performer portrait and the scene still—Shields follows photographers such as Albert Witzel and W. F. Seely as they devised the poses that newspapers and magazines would bring to Americans, who mimicked the sultry stares and dangerous glances of silent stars. He uncovers scene shots of unprecedented splendor—visions that would ignite the popular imagination. And he details how still photographs changed the film industry, whose growing preoccupation with artistry in imagery caused directors and stars to hire celebrated stage photographers and transformed cameramen into bankable names. Reproducing over one hundred and fifty of these gorgeous black-and-white photographs, Still brings to life an entire long-lost visual culture that a century later still has the power to enchant. (shrink)

"Charles "Teenie" Harris photographed the events and daily life of African Americans for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most influential Black newspapers. From the 1930s to 1970s, Harris created a richly detailed record of public personalities, historic events, and the lives of average people. In 2001, Carnegie Museum of Art purchased Harris's archive of nearly 80,000 photographic negatives, few of which are titled and dated; the archive is considered one of the most important documentations of 20th?century African (...) American life. The book will serve as the definitive publication on the life and work of Teenie Harris, consisting of three significant essays: Cheryl Finley, assistant professor in the history of art at Cornell University, offers the first thorough analysis of Harris as an artist, situating him within the history of 20th?century African American art as well as American documentary and vernacular photography; Larry Glasco, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, draws on new research to present a detailed biography of the photographer; and Joe Trotter, professor of history and social justice at Carnegie Mellon University, explores the social and historical context of Harris's photographs. The book will also include a foreword by Deborah Willis, professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. In addition to comparative illustrations within the essays, the book includes 100 plates of Harris's signature work and a complete bibliography and chronology"--. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of CultureSebastian LuftEdward Skidelsky. Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. ix + 288. Cloth $34.00.This is a curious book, because the soul of its author is torn.On the one hand, the book is a monograph on the philosopher-intellectual Ernst Cassirer. It is scholarly, noticeably well-written (not surprisingly, as the author also writes articles for British and (...) American newspapers), philosophical to the extent that it does not distort its subject matter too much, and a splendid piece of intellectual history, which places its subject, Cassirer, in a rich cultural, historical, and intellectual context. In terms of presenting the gist of Cassirer’s thought in relatively few pages, the author does everything right, disregarding minor quibbles. So far, so good.But already reading the introduction, the author makes a confession that bathes the entire book in a different light. Here we learn that the precursor of the present tome was a “straight-faced” account of the philosopher of culture, Cassirer. But over the course of writing it, Skidelsky admits, doubts crept in. Little by little, he came to see Cassirer as a dinosaur of a past age, his philosophy as a “rearguard action on behalf of a vanishing civilization” (3), which died on the battlefields of the Second World War. The “Olympian” Cassirer had an “enchanting vision” and dreamt a “happy dream” of human culture, all of which went down the drain with the advent of Nazism and has now, in our own age of postmodernism, been completely washed away.Instead, the real hero of the book is Heidegger. It was Heidegger, the existentialist, who rebelled against Western metaphysics, who won the day against Cassirer in the 1929 Davos encounter, and it is to him that we, today, owe our sensibilities. The liberalism of Cassirer—a unified vision, not just some narrowly political manifesto—“lost out to the Existenzphilosophie of Heidegger,” he writes, and, “Such unity of vision [as in Cassirer] is impossible for us. Our political principles find no support in our cultural tastes, religious beliefs, or metaphysical insights. We pay tribute to Cassirer, but Heidegger remains the secret master of our thought” (219). [End Page 116]Hence, the book is written, or rather re-written after the author’s conversion, in an ironic, sometimes melancholy style, looking back at Cassirer as a relic of a different era, his thought being “a stranger to our age” (7). Why read and study him at all then? The argument—the only argument—is weak: “he was the twentieth century’s most accomplished defender of the Humboldtian ideal” (6). Is this all? Yes, and this is how Cassirer is presented: with some sympathy, but at bottom as a creature from a different age that one observes like an exotic animal. Once more, why is this so? Skidelsky explains: “We have inherited Cassirer’s liberal political attitudes, but not the cultural sensibility that underlay them. With our skepticism toward progress, our distaste for ‘bourgeois’ formalities, our fascination with charisma, and our endless talk of commitment, authenticity, and roots, we remain, consciously or not, Heidegger’s children” (8), leaving “us” “with a dilemma” between both sentiments (ibid.).But who is this “we”? This reviewer’s suspicion is that it is first and foremost the author himself. Not denying that this dilemma might ring true to many contemporaries, it seems that the one who is troubled by it is primarily the author, who would like the world to be according to Cassirer, but who has become disenchanted with the latter’s synthetic vision due to the fragmented world around him. He would like to bring himself to believe, but cannot. But why is this? Because he has tacitly bought into the idea of all us being “Heidegger’s children.” There can be no doubt—we simply have to accept this fate.But it is this self-assurance that irks this reviewer about the author’s sentiment. Who is this “we” that he invokes? What right does he have to lump “us” together in this category of Heideggerians and to speak about “us” ex cathedra? That one... (shrink)

Most scholars in political theory and sociology have dismissed journalism as an institutional force in the public sphere, in part because of journalists' largely self-defined and curiously marginalized role as a mere transmission apparatus for traditional news. The authors advocate a philosophy ofpublic journalism faithful to the commons, in which newspapers become a site for public dialogue accessible to all citizens, where positions that could not or would not be explored elsewhere are advanced, argued, assessed, and acted upon.

From the discovery of distant galaxies and black holes to the tiny interstices of the atom, here is the very best on physics and astronomy from the New York Times! The newspaper of record has always prided itself on its award-winning science coverage, and these 125 articles from its archives are the very best, covering more than a century of breakthroughs, setbacks, and mysteries. Selected by former science editor Cornelia Dean, they feature such esteemed and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers as Malcolm (...) W. Browne on teleporting, antimatter atoms, and the physics of traffic jams; James Glanz on string theory; George Johnson on quantum physics; William L. Laurence on Bohr and Einstein; Dennis Overbye on the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson; Walter Sullivan on the colliding beam machine; and more. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and (...) invites us to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

The history and genesis of major public clinical ethics controversies is intimately related to the publication of opinions and responses in media coverage. To provide a sample of public response in the media, this paper reports the results of a content analysis of letters to editors published in the four most prolific American newspapers for the Schiavo controversy. Opinions expressed in the letters sampled strongly supported the use of living wills and strongly condemned public attention to the (...) case as well as political interventions. Letters tended to be against withdrawal of life support, proxy consent and associated procedures as well as against court decisions and legal procedures. In comparison with reports written by journalists, letters to editors contained fewer controversial claims about Schiavo''s neurological condition and behavioural repertoire but similar loaded language to describe withdrawal of life support. Distinct public discourses can be encountered in different stakeholders suggesting complex and extensive pluralism even within the media. (shrink)

efining Documents in American History: Business Ethics offers an in-depth analysis of 67 primary source documents at the foundation of the study of business ethics. These include letters, newspaper accounts, book excerpts, speeches, political debates, testimony, firsthand accounts, memoirs, court rulings, legal texts, legislative acts, excerpts from both fiction and nonfiction books, and dialogues from dramatic works. More and more, the specific ethics policies that have many businesses and corporations developed in the 1970s and 80s are not enough (...) today. Transparency related to sources and materials, pricing strategies, and the public good are crucial for the success of any business. The material in this two-volume reference work is organized into five sections, and each section begins with a brief introduction that defines questions and problems underlying the subjects addressed in the historical documents. These documents provide an overview of business ethics and how it affects all of society, from the heads of corporations in industries like oil, energy, social media, food, and transportation to the workers that produce the goods and services to the consumers of those goods and services. They present a wide array of legal and moral opinions, descriptions of the effects that business ethics can play in the national and global economy, and they take a closer look at the way that business ethics relates to politics. Each historical document is supported by a critical essay, written by historians and teachers, that includes a Summary Overview, Defining Moment, Author Biography, Document Analysis, and Essential Themes. An important feature of each essay is a close reading of the primary source that develops broader themes, such as the author s rhetorical purpose, social or class position, point of view, and other relevant issues. Each essay also includes a Bibliography and Additional Reading section for further research. The detailed document analysis begins with early essays instrumental in the creation and development of the field of business ethics and continues to 2019 by examining issues relevant right now, from harassment and discrimination to technology and privacy. This two-volume set includes in-depth chapters that provide a thorough commentary of significant primary source documents. -- Amazon.com. (shrink)

This is the diary of an observant mathematician who documented the drama of the resolution of Fermat's Last Theorem as it unfolded around him from 1993 to 1995. Pierre Fermat claimed around 1637, in the most famous marginalia in the history of mathematics, to have a proof of the theorem that xn + yn = zn has no whole number solutions for n greater than 2. The other principal figure is the British mathematician Andrew Wiles, who emigrated to Princeton (...) University in the 1980s and who in 1993, at what for mathematicians is the relatively advanced age of forty, announced a proof of FLT. In the course of Wiles's initial exposition to mathematicians, before a full‐fledged proof could be published, a gap was discovered. This was too late to forestall announcements in the world press of an imminent proof. What had been an almost secretive devotion to the task by Wiles now became a rather more public and pressurized effort over the course of nearly a year. Wiles wondered at times if success could be achieved, but with the help of other mathematicians the gap was filled in and the full formal proof published in 1995.The statement of the theorem is likely to be the only part of the 1990s story that a nonspecialist can immediately appreciate, and the author has not especially addressed his book to the nonspecialist. Rather, this account is analogous to a well‐illustrated exhibition guidebook that serves as a memento and record to those who visited in person but that is not intended fully to inform those who did not experience it. For a broader account of the historical and mathematical background a reader can consult the three principal books published previously on the same topic by Amir Aczel, Simon Singh, and Alfred J. van der Poorten. The author knew many of the main players, attended most of the key talks, took notes, made recordings, and photographed. A major part of the book is a selection of sixty‐two photographs from the total of three thousand made by the author. He asked questions of Wiles and others and recorded both formal and informal reactions that he observed around him during the many public and nonpublic presentations that were made. Also, in keeping with the journal nature of his work, he has recorded his own reactions. Appendixes include an excerpt from Wiles's 1995 Annals of Mathematics publication and a synopsis by Ram Murty of the key results by Gerhard Frey, Jean‐Pierre Serre, and Kenneth Ribet that formed a basis for Wiles's work.It may interest historians and archivists to learn of the extent to which the primary sources for this story include e‐mail, web pages, photographs, and newspaper and television interviews. Though we recognize this reality of contemporary science, a diary account probably brings the issue home more directly than would studies by professional historians, who might feel obligated to do more of their own interviews, for example, rather than rely on the media. Mathematics has rarely had such a public spotlight turned on it—the proof of the four‐color theorem in 1976 is the only comparable event that comes to mind. Consequently, it has opened an unusual window into how mathematicians do mathematics. (shrink)

By studying the many ways diverse peoples have changed, shaped, and conserved the natural world over time, environmental historians provide insight into humanity's unique relationship with nature and, more importantly, are better able to understand the origins of our current environmental crisis. Beginning with the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with our twenty-first century concerns over our global ecological crisis, _American Environmental History_ addresses contentious issues such as the preservation of the wilderness, the expulsion of native peoples (...) from national parks, and population growth, and considers the formative forces of gender, race, and class. Entries address a range of topics, from the impact of rice cultivation, slavery, and the growth of the automobile suburb to the effects of the Russian sea otter trade, Columbia River salmon fisheries, the environmental justice movement, and globalization. This illustrated reference is an essential companion for students interested in the ongoing transformation of the American landscape and the conflicts over its resources and conservation. It makes rich use of the tools and resources (climatic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists) that environmental historians rely on to conduct their research. The volume also includes a compendium of significant people, concepts, events, agencies, and legislation, and an extensive bibliography of critical films, books, and Web sites. (shrink)

This study of American intellectual histories sketches their development from colonial chronicles to today's professional scholarship. It concentrates upon the writings of a dozen or more major historians between the late 1800's and the middle 1900's who have contributed to the study of the history of ideas in America, including Moses Coit Tyler, Edward Eggleston, Charles Beard, Carl Becker, Vernon Farrington, Merle Curti, Perry Miller, and Ralph Gabriel. The various histories are analyzed partly from the perspective of a (...) developing scholarly discipline and partly from the perspective of the "climate of opinion" in which the histories were written. The methods employed by the historians in studying ideas, as well as the substantive interpretations expressed in the histories, are analyzed in relation to the "world-views" or "ideological positions" of the historians themselves. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a (...) wide variety of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

This essay explores the intersections of religious ethics and American religious history and advocates for a transdisciplinary approach to scholarship in both disciplines. Four books, each published within the last 4 years, form the foundation of this discussion by modeling distinctive elements of transdisciplinary scholarship: Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum; Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism by Peter Coviello; Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts (...) Against Domestic Violence by Juliane Hammer; and The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics by Janet R. Jakobsen. Each of these texts raises questions that hover at the intersections of religious ethics and American religious history, demonstrating how scholarship in both areas can be strengthened through a destabilization of the disciplines themselves. (shrink)

The history of the modern oil industry begins along Oil Creek in August 1859 when Edwin Drake and Billy Smith found petroleum at the bottom of their well. Over the next decade and a half, Petrolia, the name given to this region in northwest Pennsylvania, produced more oil than anywhere else on earth. In the process, Petrolia became a massive industrial site and a vivid cultural image. Understanding this profound dual transformation is the object of Brian Black's sensitively drawn (...) portrait of the landscape of America's first oil boom.A landscape, according to Black, is a place where culture and nature meet, and in the 1860s a devastating crash occurred when the natural oil of Oil Creek met the commercial demand for lamp and machine oil. Oil Creek had been a quiet, lightly populated agricultural region whose sense of place was entirely self‐constructed by the local farmers. After Drake's discovery, the area became a place of unprecedented exploitation whose identity was hastily assembled by the thousands of outsiders that flooded the area looking for work, riches, or an exciting newspaper story. Petrolia soon became a mythic boom, a mania, a craze. Distant capitalists and recently arrived entrepreneurs painted fantastic pictures of endless and easy wealth. Oil became a prized commodity, and everything else—animals, plants, people, and even the creek itself—became expendable in a single‐minded market designed to pump as much oil as fast as possible. There seemed no legal, economic, or natural limitation to the exploitation—or to the boom mentality. Petrolia became the very embodiment of greed and speculation, instantaneous wealth and sudden failure. Its mores were as ephemeral as its transient population.All this is grist for Black's ethical mill, and he grinds it well, perhaps too relentlessly. There is no doubt that looking at the exploitation of oil from the obliteration of the wooded valleys, or the filth of boomtown streets, or the emptiness of ghost towns reveals a sacrificial landscape—an environment abused, wasted, ruined, and despoiled in pursuit of profit. Certainly Black is on firm ground when he ties what happened in Petrolia to what happened in Gilded Age America as a whole, but he may overstate the case when he argues that “industrial rationalization would never allow … humanitarianism to penetrate the utilitarian logic of Petrolia” .Was the logic of oil so ruthless and the motives of the Petrolians so shortsighted as to miss what was happening around them and what they were doing to themselves? They took photographs, after all. They criticized and complained endlessly about the mud, the floods, and the fires. Certain towns curbed land speculation, restricted development, and preserved a sense of community. And capitalists, by definition investors who try to reduce risk, worked to bring stability to petroleum production and prices. Black describes these valiant if sometimes vain efforts to restrain the oil rush. But taken together, they seem to suggest more of a struggle—communities versus companies, humanitarianism versus utilitarianism—than Black acknowledges.Many of those involved in the seeming chaos that was Petrolia wanted the oil industry to become a permanent, predictable branch of mining. This was especially true for the engineers, scientists, and other petroleum experts. To this end, Black provides a useful sketch of the technology of oil production along with a brief explanation of petroleum geology. He concludes, however, that none of these experts had much effect on the problems. “Science and technology were clearly tools of industry in Petrolia” .To an extent. In Black's account, the oil “industry” was a collective evil. Equal parts cultural and economic, it acts like a numberless, faceless mob, gripped by “oil on the brain” and motivated by an all‐pervasive ethic of progress and an insatiable drive to make money. It reduces to the sharp end of a rod used to bore through the earth for oil—environmentally insensitive and destructive. As an analytical device, however, “industry” is a blunt tool. Not all wells struck oil, not all companies manipulated knowledge and technique to their own purpose. Experts learned quite a bit and quite quickly about the habits of oil. The divining rod was not the most acceptable method of exploration . Again, there was more of a struggle—sci‐tech versus random wildcatting—than Black allows.The suggestion of situated struggles, however, does not detract from Black's larger theme. Petrolia was environmental hell. Black has rendered this nightmarish landscape into a powerful and at times passionate story about the physical changes to the land and its meaning . If there is a lesson to be found in Petrolia, it is that the modern oil industry is truly an American creation. (shrink)

In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift asked its audience to reply to the question "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his age. Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault wrote a response to Kant's initial essay, positioning Kant as the initiator of the discourse and critique of modernity. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between Foucault and Kant, as a framework for its selection of unpublished essays and transcripts (...) of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality. It also offers what is in a sense the most "American" moment of Foucault's thinking, for it was in America that he realized the necessity of tying his own thought to that of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

The paper "The Dirt on 'White Slavery': The Construction of Prostitution Narratives in Early Twentieth-Century America" analyses the development of white slavery discourses in Progressive Era newspapers, reform books and trial records. White slavery involved both gendered and racialized fears of coercive prostitution. These prostitution narratives are used to uncover early twentieth-century American perceptions of appropriate femininity, inherent female weakness, and the sexual threat of racial and ethnic minorities.

The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume explores ways in (...) which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites--from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals--in which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred - some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures.The richness of contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across the Pacific to South Asia. (shrink)

For more than a decade Nina Baym has pioneered in the reexamination of American literature. She has led the way in questioning assumptions about American literary history, in critiquing the standard canon of works we read and teach, and in rediscovering lost texts by American women writers. Feminism and American Literary History collects fourteen of her most important essays published since 1980, which, combining feminist perspectives with original archival research, significantly revise standard American (...) literary history. In Part I, "Rewriting Old American Literary History," the focus is on male writers. Essays range from close readings of individual works to ambitious critiques of the main paradigms by which scholars have conventionally linked disparate texts and authors in a narrative of nationalist literary history: the self-in-the-wilderness myth, the romance-novel distinction, the myth of New England origins. Part II, "Writing New American Literary History," studies examples of women's writing from the Revolution through the Civil War. Stressing much overtly public and political writing that has been overlooked even by feminist scholars, noting public and political themes in supposedly domestic works, the essays substantially modify and historicize the paradigm by which premodern American women's writing is currently understood. The contentious and influential essays in Part III, "Two Feminist Polemics," address feminist literary theory and pedagogy, advocating a pluralist practice as the basis for scholarship, criticism, and humane feminism. No one interested in American literature or in women's writing can afford to ignore Baym's revisionist work. Humorous and gracefully written, this book is enjoyable and indispensable. (shrink)

A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people’s everyday lives The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Margaret Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of (...) the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces. A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. (shrink)

PREFACE WORD The Tanzimat period, which was the starting point of reform movements in many areas such as social, political, economic, military, etc., in which steps were taken towards Westernization, is considered to be an important milestone in drawing the fate of the Ottoman Empire. In this longest century of the empire, when many things were rushed, education partially received its share of change and reform. However, since the field of education was under the control of religious institutions such as (...) the Şeyhülislâmlık and the Nezâresi Evkâf-ı Hümâyun, the changes and reforms in this field remained limited. Regarding philosophy, which is the subject of our study, we can say in advance that philosophical movements in the West, the ideas of philosophers and philosophical education in the Western sense began to enter our country in the post-Tanzimat period. It is noteworthy that during this period when the Ottoman Empire became acquainted with Western philosophy, philosophy in the West experienced a period of crisis. In the period preceding this acquaintance, philosophy education in our country was carried out in a style loyal to the tradition of Islamic philosophy, and the break in this tradition occurred with the Tanzimat. One of the most widely debated issues from the Tanzimat to the present day has been whether or not a philosophical tradition unique to us can be established. Issues such as whether a philosophy built on our own culture and values can provide us with the opportunity to raise philosophers who are considered philosophers in the Western sense, and the level of competence and proficiency of Turkish in terms of creating a philosophical language on the way to realizing this opportunity, and efforts to establish a deep-rooted tradition continue to stand before us. In this study, from a holistic perspective, the changes in philosophical paradigms in certain periods from Tanzimat to the present day have been tried to be determined chronologically and problematically. The fact that the movements that emerged with Tanzimat were broken in certain periods, such as 1915, 1933 and 1960, and left their place to different movements, and the changes in our country in parallel with the change in the perception of philosophy in the world have been tried to be revealed in this study, and as a result of the study, results that have not been expressed so far have been reached. Again, whether the perception of philosophy has changed in society along with the change in philosophy in higher education is among the topics investigated in this study. For example, the fact that professors such as Mehmet İzzet, Niyazi Berkes and Necati Öner, who studied philosophy, regretfully admitted that it was embarrassing to say "I am studying philosophy", and instead took refuge in evasive answers such as "I am studying at the Faculty of Literature, I am studying at the Faculty of Language and History", clearly shows how the difficulty of doing philosophy in Turkey is at a high level with these prejudices. From the times when philosophy was identified with irreligion and atheism, and philosophers were seen as useless people who only criticized and did not produce solutions, to the present situation, the paths taken and the obstacles overcome make us hopeful for the bright future of philosophy in Turkey. In the Dârülfünun, which was de facto established in 1863 and opened and closed many times, philosophy courses were able to find a wide place in the curriculum after 1900 and especially after 1916. However, the contribution of philosophy courses and departments, which have been a significant part of the academy since 1916 both as a field of research and education, to the establishment and development of the longed-for original philosophical thought is currently the subject of a separate discussion. Indeed, philosophy departments have never escaped the criticism that they teach Western thought, transfer Western intellectual currents, ignore social values, and provide an exclusively Western and unproductive education. Our study, which deals with the processes of change and transition in philosophy education in Turkey and the debates on these processes, consists of three chapters and three appendices. In the first part, the studies in the field of philosophy from Tanzimat to the Republic are discussed theoretically and a general framework is tried to be drawn about the establishment of philosophy in Turkey. The topics covered in this section are mainly philosophy education until the establishment of the first university in 1863 under the name Dârülfünun and its closure and reopening in 1900 under the name Dârülfünun-ı Şâhâne. As is known, after a long period of trial and error, Dârülfünun was reformed under the name "Dârülfünun-ı Osmânî" in 1908 during the Second Constitutional Monarchy. Reforms in the field of education continued unabated, and with the university reforms in 1915 and 1933, philosophy departments also underwent significant change and transformation. Especially German faculty members, who were influential in these reforms, played an active role in the restructuring of the philosophy department. Apart from universities, philosophical activities were also carried out in non-governmental organizations, newspapers and journals. In particular, the philosophers who tried to become an association under the name of the Turkish Philosophical Society are today actively working under the name of the Philosophical Society of Turkey and the Turkish Philosophical Association. In this part of our study, in addition to these issues, the philosophers of the Republican period, which we have identified as four generations, and their philosophical attitudes and behaviors are evaluated together with the aspects reflected and not reflected in their works, and the interaction between the similarities and differences between the general characteristics of the generations and the philosophical atmosphere in the country is tried to be analyzed. The similarities and differences between the generations are analyzed since they are the main factors that determine and govern the course of philosophy in Turkey. The second chapter is devoted to "Philosophical Disciplines in Purgatory in the Republican Era". In this section, the disciplines of history of science, logic, Islamic philosophy and philosophy of religion, which we characterize as disciplines in limbo because their place in philosophy departments has always been controversial, are analyzed. In the third and final chapter, under the title "Philosophical Problems and Movements in the Republican Era", the problem of establishing the practical implications of the philosophical issues discussed in the first two chapters on the theoretical level, the question of whether Turkish can be the language of philosophy, Western philosophical movements in Turkey and their representatives are discussed. This chapter concludes with the main purpose of the study, which is to discuss the problems of philosophy in Turkey, suggestions for solutions and future perspectives. We have tried to enrich our research with three appendices that are considered to be complementary to these three chapters. The first appendix contains interviews with twelve senior professors who retired after teaching philosophy in Turkey for many years. These senior professors were asked questions about the changes in the view of philosophy in Turkey, philosophy education in higher education, their perceptions of philosophy, etc., and an important historical note was made with their answers based on their experiences. In this respect, we believe that these interviews will serve as an important source and reference for future generations and the social sciences community. Although the speeches of these professors contain many important discourses, messages and references, we have chosen one motto phrase to carry in the title. On this occasion, we would like to express our gratitude to our esteemed professors for sharing their vast knowledge and experience in the field of philosophy with us. In the second appendix, the short life stories and works of about a hundred professors in the field of philosophy in the Republican period are included. Although this information is sometimes easily obtained through the internet, biographical books or the works of the professors themselves, sometimes, after a very long and laborious work, original information has been reached, which is expressed for the first time in this study. Sometimes the capture of a very small detail required great efforts. In the third and final appendix, the names and periods of the senior philosophers of the Republican period are listed chronologically. (shrink)

Although the treatment of history in late nineteenth-century American legal scholarship remains largely unexplored, two recent areas of research have discussed this subject tangentially. Historiographical critiques of the emphasis on doctrine by American legal historians typically maintain that late nineteenth-century legal scholars viewed history as disclosing an inevitable evolutionary progression from primitive to civilized forms. This "whiggish" approach, the critiques add, ignored the context and function of past law while apologetically justifying conservative existing law as autonomous (...) scientific truth. Without addressing the historiographical critiques, scholarship about late nineteenth-century legal thinkers has touched on their historical research and assumptions, mostly in passing as part of inquiries about other subjects. Designed primarily to convey how both areas of research have contributed to the historiography of late nineteenth-century American legal history, this article concludes by drawing on my own extensive reading of the original sources. Sometimes in support but often in refutation of the existing secondary literature, my findings reveal that the late nineteenth-century scholars formed a distinctive and sophisticated American school of historical jurisprudence that merits further study. Often warning against the very faults ascribed to them by dismissive subsequent scholars, many viewed legal evolution as a contingent response to social change and urged substantial reform of existing law. The American school of historical jurisprudence, moreover, provides an important intellectual context for new insights into two giants of American legal thought, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Roscoe Pound. (shrink)

For my present purposes, and in terms of my immediate concerns, the problem of ideology in American literary history has three different though closely related aspects: first, the multivolume American literary history I have begun to edit; then, the concept of ideology as a constituent part of literary study, and, finally, the current revaluation of the American Renaissance. I select this period because it has been widely regarded as both the source and the epitome of (...) our literary tradition; because it has become, accordingly, the focal point of the critical revision now under way in American studies; and because, from either of these perspectives, literary or critical, it seems to me a particularly fitting subject for the occasion. For one thing, we owe the idea of an American Renaissance to F. O. Matthiessen, who was a prime mover of the Salzburg Seminar, and a member of its first faculty in 1947. Moreover, American Renaissance was a classic work of revisionist criticism. It reset the terms for the study of American literary history; it gave us a new canon of classic texts; and it inspired the growth of American studies in the United States and abroad. It is not too much to say that Matthiessen, American Renaissance, and the Salzburg Seminar brought American literature to postwar Europe. What followed, from the late forties through the sixties, was the flowering of a new academic field, complete with programs of study, periodicals, theses, conferences, and distinguished procession of scholarly authorities, including many graduates of the Salzburg Seminar.Matthiessen figures as a watershed in this development. For if American Renaissance marked the seeding-time of a new academic field, it was also the harvest of some three decades of literary study. I refer, first of all, to the dual legacy that Matthiessen acknowledges of T. S. Eliot and Vernon Parrington—which is to say, the partnership in American Renaissance between the terms “literary” and “history”; or, in the words of Matthiessen’s subtitle, between Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman: “art,” meaning a small group of aesthetic masterpieces, and “expression,” meaning representative works, reflecting and illuminating the culture at large. It was the remarkable achievement of Matthiessen that his book yokes these concepts gracefully together. Somehow, one concept seems to support the other. The historical designation American seems richer for its association with an aesthetic renaissance; Emerson’s and Whitman’s art gains substance by its capacity to express the age. Matthiessen himself did not feel it necessary to explain the connection. But we can see in retrospect that what made it work—what made it, indeed, unnecessary for Matthiessen to explain the connection—was an established consensus, or rather a consensus long in the making, which American Renaissance helped establish. I mean a consensus about the term “literary” that involved the legitimation of a certain canon, and a consensus about the term “history” that was legitimated by a certain concept of America. Sacvan Bercovitch is Carswell Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. He is the Author of The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad, among other works. He has also edited several collections of essays, most recently Reconstructing American Literary History. (shrink)

How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates of the burgeoning field of environmental history. Humanity´s relationship with the natural world is one of the oldest and newest topics in human history. The issue emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the early 1970s (...) and has been growing steadily ever since. The discipline´s territory and sources are rich and varied and include climactic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists, as well as federal and state economic and resource development and conservation policy. Environmental historians investigate how and why natural and human-created surroundings affect a society´s development. Merchant provides a context-setting overview of American environmental history from the beginning of the millennium; an encyclopedia of important concepts, people, agencies, and laws; a chronology of major events; and an extensive bibliography including films, videos, CD-Roms, and websites. This concise "first stop" reference for students and general readers contains an accessible overview of environmental history; a mini-encyclopedia of ideas, people, legislation, and agencies; a chronology of events and their significance; and a bibliography of books, magazines, and journals as well as films, videos, CD-ROMs, and online resources. In addition to providing a wealth of factual information, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History explores contentious issues in this much-debated field, from the idea of wilderness to global warming. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Social and Moral Aspects of the WarBertrand Russell and Introduced by Andrew G. BoneAmong nine loose-leaf folders of typed transcriptions of Russell's History of Western Philosophy lectures at the Barnes Foundation1 are two copies of a fourteen-page stenographic record of a political talk he gave there on 2 March 1941.2 The bulk of this significant new accrual to the Russell Archives, bearing as it does on Russell's most (...) successful philosophical work, could stimulate much further research and textual study. But his isolated Barnes lecture, about the politics of American neutrality, Nazi Germany's brutal and expansionist dictatorship, and the causes and possible consequences of the war against it, is also of considerable interest.The transcription reads more like detailed notes than a verbatim account, and there is no evidence that Russell approved this text.3 The stenographer initially recorded Russell in the third person, dispensed with this device before the second [End Page 52] paragraph, but then occasionally returned to it.4 There is also more enumeration of Russell's points than he would have supplied in a prepared script. Even the title may not be his: there is nothing in the text on any social changes wrought by the war. But this title has been retained in the absence of a more plausible alternative in a short report of the speech (quoting sixteen sentences) in the next day's Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.5 Russell's hour-long address on the "Social and Moral Aspects of the War" appears to have been the only occasion when he "laid philosophy aside"6 at the Barnes Foundation. It was delivered on a Sunday to an audience of 160 students (and possibly some invitees, although none are mentioned in the newspaper article), sandwiched between two of his weekly philosophical lectures (on Socrates and Sparta7) in the series scheduled for each Thursday.In opening his case for the United States joining the Allied war effort, Russell challenged the arguments for the "policy of conciliation" which, by his own recent admission in the New York Times,8 he had earlier endorsed. Published two weeks before Russell spoke on a similar topic at the Barnes Foundation, this 2,000-word letter to the editor served as a very detailed and public renunciation of the pacifist viewpoint—neutrality for national governments combined with non-resistance for individuals—which Russell had promoted in Which Way to Peace? (1936) and continued to condone after the Munich Agreement (September 1938) and even the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia (March 1939).Yet Russell the "relative political pacifist"9 also admitted in this most programmatic statement of his prewar position that "In other times and other circumstances, I should be prepared to consider gains and losses, and to concede that war might be worth while" (WWP, pp. 151–2).That moment had obviously arrived and may have done so already when on 15 October 1939 Russell confided to Constance Malleson that his passionate desire for a British victory made a "thorough-going pacifism difficult" (ra Rec. Acq. 596). But six months later he still did "not feel sufficiently sure of the opposite to say anything publicly by way of recantation"—before adding in this letter to Gilbert Murray that "it may come to that" (21 April 1940, ra Rec. Acq. 71g). It clearly did shortly afterwards—when the "phoney war" in Western Europe was dramatically ended by the invasion of France and the [End Page 53] Low Countries. On 13 May Russell asked the editor of the New Statesman and Nation to notify its readers that he had abandoned his once strongly held pacifist convictions.10In his lecture to the Barnes Foundation, Russell turned next to the defence of American non-intervention by Robert M. Hutchins (see n. 16 below)—which he had already critiqued in the New York Times. Although rather precariously situated as a resident alien in the United States, Russell was hardly circumspect about pushing a policy that so sharply divided American opinion.11 He also listed the faults of the League of Nations and the most grievous diplomatic mistakes made since the end of the last war and the fatally... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Social and Moral Aspects of the WarBertrand Russell and Introduced by Andrew G. BoneAmong nine loose-leaf folders of typed transcriptions of Russell's History of Western Philosophy lectures at the Barnes Foundation1 are two copies of a fourteen-page stenographic record of a political talk he gave there on 2 March 1941.2 The bulk of this significant new accrual to the Russell Archives, bearing as it does on Russell's most (...) successful philosophical work, could stimulate much further research and textual study. But his isolated Barnes lecture, about the politics of American neutrality, Nazi Germany's brutal and expansionist dictatorship, and the causes and possible consequences of the war against it, is also of considerable interest.The transcription reads more like detailed notes than a verbatim account, and there is no evidence that Russell approved this text.3 The stenographer initially recorded Russell in the third person, dispensed with this device before the second [End Page 52] paragraph, but then occasionally returned to it.4 There is also more enumeration of Russell's points than he would have supplied in a prepared script. Even the title may not be his: there is nothing in the text on any social changes wrought by the war. But this title has been retained in the absence of a more plausible alternative in a short report of the speech (quoting sixteen sentences) in the next day's Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.5 Russell's hour-long address on the "Social and Moral Aspects of the War" appears to have been the only occasion when he "laid philosophy aside"6 at the Barnes Foundation. It was delivered on a Sunday to an audience of 160 students (and possibly some invitees, although none are mentioned in the newspaper article), sandwiched between two of his weekly philosophical lectures (on Socrates and Sparta7) in the series scheduled for each Thursday.In opening his case for the United States joining the Allied war effort, Russell challenged the arguments for the "policy of conciliation" which, by his own recent admission in the New York Times,8 he had earlier endorsed. Published two weeks before Russell spoke on a similar topic at the Barnes Foundation, this 2,000-word letter to the editor served as a very detailed and public renunciation of the pacifist viewpoint—neutrality for national governments combined with non-resistance for individuals—which Russell had promoted in Which Way to Peace? (1936) and continued to condone after the Munich Agreement (September 1938) and even the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia (March 1939).Yet Russell the "relative political pacifist"9 also admitted in this most programmatic statement of his prewar position that "In other times and other circumstances, I should be prepared to consider gains and losses, and to concede that war might be worth while" (WWP, pp. 151–2).That moment had obviously arrived and may have done so already when on 15 October 1939 Russell confided to Constance Malleson that his passionate desire for a British victory made a "thorough-going pacifism difficult" (ra Rec. Acq. 596). But six months later he still did "not feel sufficiently sure of the opposite to say anything publicly by way of recantation"—before adding in this letter to Gilbert Murray that "it may come to that" (21 April 1940, ra Rec. Acq. 71g). It clearly did shortly afterwards—when the "phoney war" in Western Europe was dramatically ended by the invasion of France and the [End Page 53] Low Countries. On 13 May Russell asked the editor of the New Statesman and Nation to notify its readers that he had abandoned his once strongly held pacifist convictions.10In his lecture to the Barnes Foundation, Russell turned next to the defence of American non-intervention by Robert M. Hutchins (see n. 16 below)—which he had already critiqued in the New York Times. Although rather precariously situated as a resident alien in the United States, Russell was hardly circumspect about pushing a policy that so sharply divided American opinion.11 He also listed the faults of the League of Nations and the most grievous diplomatic mistakes made since the end of the last war and the fatally... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 489 right; and it will be of interest to students of modern aesthetics. But compared with Rudolf Makkreel's ground-breaking study, Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton, 1975), it is handicapped by an exasperating vagueness. This is mainly because Heinen does not go more deeply into Dilthey's profuse aesthetic writings from a historical perspective and on the basis of a commitment to an appropriate methodology. What we (...) get, instead, is a rather one-sided reflection on several important aspects of Dilthey's aesthetic writings. ROLF-DIETERHERRMANN University of Tennessee Young John Dewey: An Essay in American Intellectual History. By Nell Coughlan. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. xii + 187) The author's aim in this carefully researched volume is to examine the early development of Dewey's character, primarily as it is expressed in the changes in his philosophical development from the time he was a student at the University of Vermont until he left the University of Michigan to go to Chicago in 1894. The account is at its best in relating the common problems shared by Dewey, his teachers George Sylvester Morris and G. Stanley Hall and his younger colleague George Herbert Mead. All were conscientious men, concerned to develop an account of the world and of society that does not fall back on religion as a crutch, that could give some accounting of or even take advantage of new developments in empirical psychology yet still provide a role for the philosopher as a moral leader. Where in the America of the 1870s and 1880s could such a person turn? Aside from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, there was no place for the independent, secular philosopher in American colleges and universities. The safe clergyman was typically given employment; the free thinking agnostic was considered dangerous. Further, there was the problem of intellectual isolation. Coughlan brilliantly contrasts the tight knit intellectual community of Victorian England with the struggles of individual American thinkers, scattered around the United States, to find like-minded intellectual companionship. Morris tried to resolve these problems by embracing the idealism of T. H. Green and hoping for a full-time chair at Hopkins. Hall, who eventually got the chair, went into empirical psychology. His choice was safe and intellectually respectable but ignored moral matters. Mead and a young friend named Henry Castle went through a long struggle to develop a satisfactory world view. Castle never achieved success and died in a shipwreck at age 32. Mead's correspondence with Castle reveals that he endured a number of acute personal crises before becoming Dewey's colleague at Michigan and discovering the latter's newly developing "organic circuit" theory with all its implications for the development of social psychology. Dewey was the most successful of the lot. It would be easy to construe a scenario wherein the young Dewey became skeptical about Green's idealism and underwent an acute personal crisis at the prospect of a world no longer glued together by the universal mind. This apparently never happened. By his own account, Dewey's "drift" from idealism took fifteen years, 1and I suspect that this gradual disengagement served as an effective buffer against the shock of having to develop an experimental naturalism all of a sudden. At any rate, Coughlan gives the most thorough account available of the evolution of Dewey's thought during the Michigan years. Coughlan is on solid ground so long as he treats Dewey as a person who shared common intellectual problems with like-minded colleagues and teachers. But how can one reconstruct his personal life? The difficulties are real. Dewey's published writings of the period reveal little John Dewey, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism," in John Dewey on Experience, Nature, and Freedom, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), p. 12. 490 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of his personality. Indeed, one is moved to ask whether his personality was almost entirely submerged in his work. Colleagues, friends and students are no longer available to tell their story. There is little in the way of revealing personal correspondence that is available. Dewey was not inclined to reminisce.2 About all we have from him... (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: INTRODUCTION 1 -- Focus of the Sections and Sub-sections 1 -- East Asian Internet Resources 1 -- A Note on Using the Index 2 -- GENERAL WORKS ON PHILOSOPHY& RELIGION IN ASIA 5 -- BUDDHISM 37 -- Primary Sources 37 -- Buddhist Ethics 38 -- Buddhism and Judeo-Christianity 52 -- Zen Buddhism 69 -- Other Works on Buddhism 76 -- CONFUCIANISM 95 -- Chinese and Confucian Classics 95 -- Translations of the Four Books 95 -- Translations (...) of other Chinese Classics 97 -- Secondary Works on Confucianism and/or the Chinese Classics --00 -- Neo-Confucianism 136 -- Confucian Ethics 150 -- Works on Confucianism and Judeo-Christianity 172 -- TAOISM 191 -- Primary Sources in Translation 191 -- Secondary Works on Chuang-tzu, Lao-tse and/or Taoism192 -- Taoism and Judaeo-Christianity 205 -- CHINESE/ CONFUCIAN UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 209 -- BUSINESS & ECONOMIC ETHICS IN ASIA 223 -- General, Miscellaneous, and/or Background Material 223 -- Business & Economic Ethics: China 225 -- Business & Economic Ethics: Japan 226 -- Business & Economic Ethics: Korea 228 -- HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE EAST ASIAN CONTEXT 231 -- ASIAN WOMEN'S PHILOSOPHY &THEOLOGY 247 SELECTED COUNTRIES OF EAST ASIA 2. -- CHINA2 -- China and Christianity2 -- Jesuit Approach to Evangelization in China2( -- Other Works on China and Roman Catholicism2 -- China and Protestantism2 -- Other Works on China and Christianity28 -- Other Works on Chinese Culture and Philosophy 29 -- JA PA N 32 -- Buddhism in Japan32 -- Shintoism and Confucianism in Japan 33 -- Christianity in Japan33, -- Other Works on Japanese Culture, Philosophy and Religion34' -- KOREA35! -- Buddhism in Korea 35! -- Christianity in Korea 36' -- Confucianism and Christianity in Korea 36: -- General Works on Christianity in Korea 36E -- Korea and Catholicism 38C -- Korean-American Christianity 390 -- Confucianism in Korea 394 -- M injung Theology 404 -- Women's Issues and Feminist Theology in Korea 423 -- Shamanism in Korea 432 -- Other Works on Korea, Including General Works on Religion --437 -- EAST ASIAN INTERNET RESOURCES 455 -- SUBJECT-AREA WEB-SITES 455 -- MISCELLANEOUS PHILOSOPHICAL/RELIGIOUS -- STUDIES SITES456 -- EAST ASIAN ART, GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, AND/OR -- CULTURE SITES 466 -- OTHER ASIAN INTEREST WEB-SITES 471 -- CHINA471 -- JAPAN 480 -- KOREA 481 -- SINGAPORE 486 -- DISCUSSIONAND/OR NEWS GROUPS 486 -- ONLINE (ELECTRONIC) JOURNALS AND NEWSLETTERS488 -- EAST ASIAN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE NEWSPAPERS 494 -- LIBRARIES AND/OR UNIVERSITY WEB-PAGES496 -- SEARCH ENGINES 501 -- INDEX 503. (shrink)

In today's sometimes volatile political climate, one often hears the charge that some issue or other has been politicized. The claim, when made, almost always constitutes an accusation that something illicit or immoral has been perpetrated by one's political opponents. Thus, writing in the congressional newspaper The Hill prior to the 2006 midterm elections, columnist Josh Marshall contends that "President Bush has politicized national security policy and used foreign policy to divide the country more than any president in modern (...) class='Hi'>American history. It'll be a big part of what I believe will be the very dark verdict history will render on his presidency.". (shrink)