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Intellectual History Newsletter returns to BU, will become full journal
By David J. Craig
Many American academics regarded intellectual history as elitist and
outdated when the Intellectual History Newsletter began at New York University
in 1979. The subject traditionally focused on past developments in classical
philosophy and largely had been eclipsed in the United States by social
history, which was grounded in the political radicalism of the 1960s.
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Charles Capper Photo courtesy of CAS history department |
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More than 20 years later, however, intellectual history has reestablished
itself as an important subfield of history, according to Charles Capper,
a CAS professor of history and the Newsletter's editor. The newsletter,
which was published at BU from 1985 to 1995, returns with its next issue
in late October after seven years at North Carolina State University.
Under Capper, it will be transformed into a full-fledged academic journal,
Modern Intellectual History, and will be published by Cambridge University
Press beginning in 2004.
"Now is a perfect moment to create a new intellectual history journal
because the enthusiasm for social history has waned in the last few years,
as historians realize that people are not simply the product of social
behavior," says Capper. "There is more recognition now among
historians that to understand a certain period of American history, you
have to appreciate the ideas of that period. For example, to understand
what Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams meant when they compared British
tax policy to slavery during the American Revolution, you have to know
that the word slavery to them meant any attempt to force the dependency
of an entire society, and that they used the word independence as a trope
for virtue. When you get that, you enter a new world.
"Modern Intellectual History will be the first major history journal
to be launched in the last 20 years by any university press," Capper
continues, "and we certainly expect it to compete with the other
major history journals." It will be edited by Capper, current Newsletter
co-editor Anthony La Vopa, a history professor at North Carolina State
University, and Nicholas Phillipson of Edinburgh University in Scotland.
The Intellectual History Newsletter was begun by NYU professor Thomas
Bender, Capper says, in an attempt "to rally the troops" at
a time when the serious study of ideas had taken a backseat in most American
history departments to analyses of how U.S. social and political movements
had organized at different times. "Intellectual historians felt it
was unfortunate that in focusing on the development of communities and
on social behavior, historians were marginalizing the study of ideas,
concepts, and languages," says Capper. "It seemed to be forgotten
that these are the things that give meaning to our social practices, that
motivate us, that help explain how we understand our world and how we
act. The newsletter wanted to show that intellectual history wasn't elitist
by incorporating new ways of studying those subjects."
So the Intellectual History Newsletter, which started out as a photocopied,
20-page periodical, included women's intellectual history and comparisons
of the ideas popular among American, European, and nonwestern intellectuals,
and it branched off into other fields embraced by social and cultural
historians, such as literary criticism and postmodern social theory. It
remains a small, informal publication that goes out to about 400 subscribers,
featuring symposia and essays, but little original research.
Modern Intellectual History will be similarly eclectic, Capper says, but
will contain original research. It will distinguish itself, he says, from
the Journal of the History of Ideas, the prominent intellectual history
journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press, partly by including
more discussions about the arts, social and political thought, the history
of many academic disciplines, and debates about popular culture.
"We'll look at culture more broadly than does the Journal of the
History of Ideas, which focuses mostly on the history of philosophical
ideas," says Capper. "We'll also have an international emphasis,
while the Journal focuses exclusively on Europe. In addition, we'll engage
intellectual history in the modern era; that is, since the Enlightenment,
which will allow us to go into more depth than the Journal does, as it
covers everything from the ancient period to the present."
The forthcoming and final Intellectual History Newsletter is a special
145-page issue consisting of 16 essays by historians and political theorists
on the history of liberalism in the United States and Europe.
"Liberalism is one theme that Modern Intellectual History will be
very concerned with," says Capper. "And the purpose of this
special issue of the Newsletter is to explore what exactly is meant by
the term liberalism. Since the 1960s in the academy, liberalism has often
been narrowly defined in economic or political terms -- that is, associated
with unfettered free markets or rationalistic systems of dominance over
'backward peoples,' while among conservative pundits and even many citizens,
the 'L-word' has become synonymous with the absence of moral standards.
"What these essays demonstrate is that over the last 250 years, liberal
intellectuals have often been deeply engaged in religion and ethics, inspired
by the goal of promoting human freedom," he continues. "Sometimes
that has meant the advocacy of curtailing the authority of the state,
and at other times expanding it to promote the power of individuals. So
that has been a cultural tradition that's been lost sight of and that
we've tried to recover."
Capper, who is an expert on the American transcendentalists, is on a yearlong
fellowship at the University of North Carolina, where he is completing
the second volume of a biography of the transcendentalist leader and author
Margaret Fuller. The first volume, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic
Life, won the 1993 Bancroft Prize. He also is beginning a new book, The
Transcendental Moment: Romantic Intellect and America's Democratic Awakening,
which describes how New England avant-garde writers in the 1830s balanced
an interest in high culture and popular social movements such as abolitionism,
and how they engaged modern criticism while retaining their spiritual
and religious visions. Capper is coeditor of American Intellectual Tradition
(Oxford University Press, 1989), which is widely taught in college intellectual
history courses.
4 October 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations