intellectual history

Maps are the Record of Humans' Imagination of the World

by Meredith F. Small

World maps have always been made without regard for practicality. Useless for navigation or for demarcating ownership, they are imaginative and expressive of a society's view of the world—which makes them important. 

Mary Wollstonecraft's Diagnosis of the Prejudices Holding Back Girls' Education Remains Relevant Today

by Victoria Bateman

Since Wollstonecraft's 1792 condemnation of the strictures of modesty and sexual purity as unjust impediments to the education of girls and women, they remain principal justifications for keeping girls out of school. 

A Conversation with the Editors of a Collection of DuBois's Internationalist Thought

by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Adom Getachew and Jennifer Pitts strive to demonstrate that DuBois's influential writings on African American life and American racism are inseparable from his global critiques of racism and imperialism, and his insistence on connecting racism with labor exploitation. 

Chad L. Williams on DuBois's Unfinished "Wounded World"

A DuBois biographer discusses the work of tracing the great intellectual's life and work, and the experience of reading an unpublished and unfinished manuscript. 

Recognizing the "Other Renaissance" of Northern Europe

by Paul Strathern

From Copernicus to Shakespeare, the intellectual transformations of northern Europe have seldom been understood as a world-changing ferment akin to those taking place in Italy. 

For Derby Day, a Note of Caution About Horses and "Races"

by Mackenzie Cooley

The thoroughbreds on display at Churchill Downs next Saturday carry on Italian renaissance practices of horse breeding for sport and aesthetic pleasure. But the spectacle warns of another legacy: the fateful transfer of the term "race" from purposefully selected lineages of horses to broad groupings of humans. 

The Crisis of the Intellectuals

by Ibram X. Kendi

A dire health crisis forced the author to ask what his intellectual work was ultimately for. Intellectuals more broadly need a similar push from the dire state of democracy, and should be assured that when they face pushback about being "illiberal" or "presentist" or violating the traditions of their discipline, they're on the right track. 

Moral Panics Around the Humanities Reflect Long-Developing Paradigm Shift

by Steven Mintz

The ferocity of attacks on the humanities and academic research as "indoctrination" reflect the recent integration of ideas with long histories in academia into highly visible protest movements. Can humanists connect newer thinking to the established concerns of the humanities for understanding justice or the good life? 

Review: The Right-Wing Abuse of Adam Smith

by Kim Phillips-Fein

Glory M. Liu's account of Adam Smith's reception in America explains how American politicians read selectively in Smith's capacious writings on political economy and public morality to construct a self-interested view of the market as a natural phenomenon, writes historian Kim Phillips-Fein. 

You Can't Have Ideological Conflict When One Side Abandons Ideas

by Timothy Noah

Sociologist Daniel Bell described ideology as "the commitment to the consequences of ideas." If this doesn't describe the GOP today, the author wonders how well the term "party of ideas" ever applied. 

Recent Discovery Shows Women Scholars have been Hiding in Plain Sight of History

by Joel Marie Cabrita

Advances in imaging technology have revealed that an 8th century woman named Eadburg inscribed her name on the pages of a manuscript, claiming status as a woman of letters. The revelation also calls for more creative methods to find women scholars and assess their contributions. 

Revisiting Kropotkin 180 Years After His Birth

by Sam Ben-Meir

The rise of automation and the concurrent squeeze of workers in the name of profit offer an opportunity to revisit the ideas of Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin as a forward-looking critique of power. 

Edifice Complex: "Burnout" Used to Refer to the Problems of the Urban Poor

by Bench Ansfield

The psychologization of stress and fatigue under the term "burnout" has blunted consideration of how and why modern society makes people stressed and fatigued. The term's history shows the critical turns not taken. 

Americans Have Always Imagined and Demanded Better Alternatives; Those Alternatives Have Been Hidden

by Jamelle Bouie

Thomas Skidmore's critique of inequality held that the inequality of private property consigned the majority of humanity to toil for the enjoyment of a minority, a situation irreconcilable with democracy. 

The Takeover: The Self-Righteous Faculty and their Self-Righteous Students

by Russell Jacoby

A past critic of the self-proclaimed academic radicals of the 1980s used to think they were really careerists posing as leftists without impact on society. Now, he thinks they've changed the culture for the worse. 

Libertarianism's Philosophers Come Out Worse For Wear

by Rebecca Brenner Graham

A fellowship at a leading libertarian institute convinced the author that the movement sees its luminaries as icons, not as historical figures. 

Adam Smith Resolved the Identity-Distribution Debate—Why Is it Forgotten?

by Corey Robin

The political scientist Corey Robin considers a new book on Adam Smith's thought, and the role it played in posing questions about the purpose of the economy, and its relationship to individuals a selves embedded in society. 

Kimberle Crenshaw on CRT and Acknowledging American History (Podcast)

The noted legal scholar discusses Critical Race Theory, anti-intellectualism in politics, and new work in African American political studies with host Bakari Sellers. 

Melvin Rogers: How Black Thinkers Remade America's Political Traditions

From Douglass to DuBois, African American intellectuals have pushed for the theory of American republicanism to wrestle with the conflict between racial domination and political equality. 

The Decline of Intellectual History is a Problem

by Steven Mintz

Ideas matter, and the eclipse of the field of intellectual history puts an understanding of important ones in jeopardy. Even as intellectual history broadens and diversifies, it is still associated with the thoughts of elites.