Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910-1945

Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910-1945
Author: Steven Biel
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 1995-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780814712320

A cultural history of freelance critics and an exploration of their collective effort to construct a viable public intellectual life in the US. Independence and social engagement were the terms of self- definition and the aspirations that bound together a broad range of critics, including Randolph Bourne, Max Eastman, Walter Lippmann, Margaret Sanger, Van Wyck Brooks, Edmund Wilson, H.L. Mencken, Lewis Mumford, Malcolm Cowley, and Waldo Frank. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Intellectuals Incorporated

Intellectuals Incorporated
Author: Robert Vanderlan
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2011-06-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812205634

Publishing tycoon Henry Luce famously championed many conservative causes, and his views as a capitalist and cold warrior were reflected in his glossy publications. Republican Luce aimed squarely for the Middle American masses, yet his magazines attracted intellectually and politically ambitious minds who were moved by the democratic aspirations of the New Deal and the left. Much of the best work of intellectuals such as James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, Daniel Bell, John Hersey, and Walker Evans owes a great debt to their experiences writing for Luce and his publications. Intellectuals Incorporated tells the story of the serious writers and artists who worked for Henry Luce and his magazines Time, Fortune, and Life between 1923 and 1960, the period when the relationship between intellectuals, the culture industry, and corporate capitalism assumed its modern form. Countering the notions that working for corporations means selling out and that the true life of the mind must be free from institutional ties, historian Robert Vanderlan explains how being embedded in the corporate culture industries was vital to the creative efforts of mid-century thinkers. Illuminating their struggles through careful research and biographical vignettes, Vanderlan shows how their contributions to literary journalism and the wider political culture would have been impossible outside Luce's media empire. By paying attention to how these writers and photographers balanced intellectual aspiration with journalistic perspiration, Intellectuals Incorporated advances the idea of the intellectual as a connected public figure who can engage and criticize organizations from within.

American Nietzsche

American Nietzsche
Author: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226705811

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.

Social Control and Public Intellect

Social Control and Public Intellect
Author: Sean McMahon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1351289586

As the last presumptive founder of American sociology, Edward Alsworth Ross (1866û1951) was the first to secure its place in public discourse. Originally an economist who strongly criticized monopolies, Ross sought answers to the larger social issues of his day. His theory of social control helped to unify sociology into an independent discipline and elevate social research into an academic necessity. He implored sociologists to explain those social forces that unified people into sustainable groups. This first full analysis of Ross's intellectual legacy uses new sources to explore more broadly the scope of his influence.Throughout his career, Ross remained a controversial figure. Strong critiques of monopolies and immigration led to his dismissal from Stanford in 1900 in a landmark academic freedom case. Never satisfied with qualitative research, Ross traveled the world in search of social changes which he reported back to the American public. A 1910 trip to China yielded profound conclusions on the American economy and on the status of women. As one of the first observers of revolutionary Russia, Ross emerged at once critical of socialism and confident in the American system. Moreover, his articles reached a wide audience to demonstrate the usefulness and scope of American sociology. As Ross gained public favor, however, his academic reputation waned. By the 1920s he was left in the wake of quantitative scholarship. His concept of social control continued to engage academic theorists while new applications emerged in industrial management. After his death, scholars have debated new meanings of social control even as the disciplines of history and sociology have fragmented.In offering this examination of Ross's thought, McMahon draws on new primary materials, including interviews, to recreate the controversies that surrounded his career. The depths of his pursuits have never been so fully explored, and this new look at Ross places him among the giants of American intellectual life. Social Control and Public Intellect will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and American studies specialists.

The Right of the Protestant Left

The Right of the Protestant Left
Author: M. Edwards
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2012-06-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137019905

While serving as an introduction to ecumenical liberal Protestantism and the social gospel over the course of the twentieth-century this book also highlights certain totalitarian as well as more fundamental conservative tendencies within those movements.

The Secular Revolution

The Secular Revolution
Author: Christian Smith
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520230002

This collection presents a radical rethinking of the secularization of American public life.

Print Culture in a Diverse America

Print Culture in a Diverse America
Author: James Philip Danky
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780252066993

In the modern era, there arose a prolific and vibrant print culture--books, newspapers, and magazines issued by and for diverse, often marginalized, groups. This long-overdue collection offers a unique foray into the multicultural world of reading and readers in the United States. The contributors to this award-winning collection pen interdisciplinary essays that examine the many ways print culture functions within different groups. The essays link gender, class, and ethnicity to the uses and goals of a wide variety of publications and also explore the role print materials play in constructing historical events like the Titanic disaster. Contributors: Lynne M. Adrian, Steven Biel, James P. Danky, Elizabeth Davey, Michael Fultz, Jacqueline Goldsby, Norma Fay Green, Violet Johnson, Elizabeth McHenry, Christine Pawley, Yumei Sun, and Rudolph J. Vecoli

Critical Americans

Critical Americans
Author: Leslie Butler
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2009-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807877573

In this intellectual history of American liberalism during the second half of the nineteenth century, Leslie Butler examines a group of nationally prominent and internationally oriented writers who sustained an American tradition of self-consciously progressive and cosmopolitan reform. She addresses how these men established a critical perspective on American racism, materialism, and jingoism in the decades between the 1850s and the 1890s while she recaptures their insistence on the ability of ordinary citizens to work toward their limitless potential as intelligent and moral human beings. At the core of Butler's study are the writers George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, a quartet of friends who would together define the humane liberalism of America's late Victorian middle class. In creative engagement with such British intellectuals as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, John Ruskin, James Bryce, and Goldwin Smith, these "critical Americans" articulated political ideals and cultural standards to suit the burgeoning mass democracy the Civil War had created. This transatlantic framework informed their notions of educative citizenship, print-based democratic politics, critically informed cultural dissemination, and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy. Butler argues that a careful reexamination of these strands of late nineteenth-century liberalism can help enrich a revitalized liberal tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century.

The New England Watch and Ward Society

The New England Watch and Ward Society
Author: P. C. Kemeny
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2017-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190844418

The New England Watch and Ward Society provides a new window into the history of the Protestant establishment's prominent role in late nineteenth-century public life and its confrontation with modernity, commercial culture, and cultural pluralism in early twentieth-century America. Elite liberal Protestants, typically considered progressive, urbane, and tolerant, established the Watch and Ward Society in 1878 to suppress literature they deemed obscene, notably including Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. These self-appointed custodians of Victorian culture enjoyed widespread support from many of New England's most renowned ministers, distinguished college presidents, respected social reformers, and wealthy philanthropists. In the 1880s, the Watch and Ward Society expanded its efforts to regulate public morality by attacking gambling and prostitution. The society not only expressed late nineteenth-century Victorian American values about what constituted "good literature," sexual morality, and public duty, it also embodied Protestants' efforts to promote these values in an increasingly intellectually and culturally diverse society. By 1930, the Watch and Ward Society had suffered a very public fall from grace. Following controversies over the suppression of H.L. Mencken's American Mercury as well as popular novels such as Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, cultural modernists, civil libertarians, and publishers attacked the moral reform movement, ridiculing its leaders' privileged backgrounds, social idealism, and religious commitments. Their critique reshaped the dynamics of Protestant moral reform activity as well as public discourse in subsequent decades. For more than a generation, however, the Watch and Ward Society expressed mainline Protestant attitudes toward literature, gambling, and sexuality.

Emma Goldman, "Mother Earth," and the Anarchist Awakening

Emma Goldman,
Author: Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2021-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0268200289

This book unveils the history and impact of an unprecedented anarchist awakening in early twentieth-century America. Mother Earth, an anarchist monthly published by Emma Goldman, played a key role in sparking and spreading the movement around the world. One of the most important figures in revolutionary politics in the early twentieth century, Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was essential to the rise of political anarchism in the United States and Europe. But as Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu makes clear in this book, the work of Goldman and her colleagues at the flagship magazine Mother Earth (1906–1917) resonated globally, even into the present day. As a Russian Jewish immigrant to the United States in the late nineteenth century, Goldman developed a keen voice and ideology based on labor strife and turbulent politics of the era. She ultimately was deported to Russia due to agitating against World War I. Hsu takes a comprehensive look at Goldman’s impact and legacy, tracing her work against capitalism, advocacy for feminism, and support of homosexuality and atheism. Hsu argues that Mother Earth stirred an unprecedented anarchist awakening, inspiring an antiauthoritarian spirit across social, ethnic, and cultural divides and transforming U.S. radicalism. The magazine’s broad readership—immigrant workers, native-born cultural elite, and professionals in various lines of work—was forced to reflect on society and their lives. Mother Earth spread the gospel of anarchism while opening it to diversified interpretations and practices. This anarchist awakening was more effective on personal and intellectual levels than on the collective, socioeconomic level. Hsu explores the fascinating history of Mother Earth, headquartered in New York City, and captures a clearer picture of the magazine’s influence by examining the dynamic teamwork that occurred beyond Goldman. The active support of foreign revolutionaries fostered a borderless radical network that resisted all state and corporate powers. Emma Goldman, “Mother Earth,” and the Anarchist Awakening will attract readers interested in early twentieth-century history, transnational radicalism, and cosmopolitan print culture, as well as those interested in anarchism, anti-militarism, labor activism, feminism, and Emma Goldman.