American Intellectual History: Issues for the 1980s

The study of now confronts a series of opportunities and dilemmas that are too often obscured by the tendency of historiographical discussion to dwell on such ephemeral issues as this field's relative status in the profession, the morale of its practitioners, and the exact location of its boundaries with other fields. Basic to all three of these distractions is a lamentable preoccupation with professional rather than challenges. Challenges of these two kinds are of course connected, but even challenges defined primarily by the dynamics of the profession are most appropriately met by directly addressing challenges, instead of the other way around. should be approached not as a distinctive population of practitioners whose interests are at stake but as an expanse occupied periodically by scholars operating out of many networks and possessed of a variety of skills -an expanse that is the property of no one, even of scholars who spend enough of their time in it to become known as intellectual historians. We would do well to see this expanse as a commons instead of an estate. The opportunities and dilemmas found there are best recognized in the context of what has been taking place on this commons in recent years. The study of is surely one of the most diverse, eclectic, and loosely organized of the subdisciplines of that retain a single name, and that form the basis for undergraduate courses and for major headings in indexes of dissertations and of scholarly monographs. This has always been so, but what counts as American history is now a more open question than ever before. Teaching and scholarship were once sustained in part by the notion that there exists a distinctive tradition: courses could be organized around this tradition, and monographs could be written on episodes in its growth and transformation. Whatever else this tradition might encompass, it was known to include the thought of the Puritans, Edwards, Franklin, the Founding Fathers, the Transcendentalists, and the Pragmatists. With the waning of belief in the reality of a distinctive national tradition, at least one with this old cast of characters, the field of lost its hold on