History

This book provides a history of the rise of realism in American culture. It captures the character and sweep of this all-encompassing movement—ranging from Winslow Homer to the rise of the Ash Can school, from Whitman to Henry James to Theodore Dreiser. It begins with a look at the idealist atmosphere of the antebellum years, when otherwordly themes are considered the only fit subject for art. Whitman's assault on these standards coincided with sweeping changes in American society: the bloody Civil War, the aggressive advance of a modern scientific spirit, the popularity of photography, the expansion of cities, capitalism, and the middle class—all worked to shake the foundations of genteel idealism and sentimental romanticism. Both artists and the public developed an ever-expanding appetite for hard facts, and for art that accurately depicted them. As the book proceeds through the 19th century, it traces the realist revolution in each major area of arts and letters, combining an analysis of the movement's essential themes with incisive portraits of its leading practitioners. Here we see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., shaken to stern realism by the horrors of the Civil War; the influence of Walt Whitman on painter Thomas Eakins and architect Louis Sullivan, a leader of the Chicago school; the local-color verisimilitude of Louisa May Alcott and Sarah Orne Jewett; and the impact of urban squalor on intrepid young writers such as Stephen Crane.

Spanning both the history of the modern West and the author's own five-decade journey as a historian, this essay collection covers the same breadth of topics that has characterized his career—from Benjamin Franklin to Gustav Mahler, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Beard, from the notion of constitution in seventeenth-century England to the concept of neutrality in twentieth-century Austria. This storied career brought him in the 1950s from the University of Vienna to the University of Chicago—of which he draws a brilliant picture—and later took him to Berlin and eventually back to Austria. One of the few prominent scholars equally at home with U.S. history and the history of central Europe, the author has informed these geographically diverse experiences and subjects with the overarching themes of his scholarly achievement: the comparative study of liberal constitutionalism and the struggle for equal rights at the core of Western notions of free government. The book was composed between 1953 and 2005, and includes a new autobiographical essay written especially for this volume.

This book provides a compelling explanation of the contents and substance of conservative ideas, their intentions and consequences, and the historical contexts that contributed to their formulation and dissemination among a variety of audiences. The book adds a novel, comparative dimension to the study of those ideas that informed conservatism by examining the subjects, motives, and personal and intellectual origins of historians who were also successful, polemical public intellectuals. Until at least the 1960s, in their search for a persuasive and wide appeal, conservatives depended upon history and historians to provide conservative concepts with authority and authenticity. Beginning in 1913 in Britain and 1940 in America, conservative historians participated actively and influentially in debates about the heart, soul, and, especially, the mind of conservatism. Four historians in Britain, F. J. C. Hearnshaw, Keith Feiling, Arthur Bryant, and Herbert Butterfield, and three in America, Daniel Boorstin, Peter Viereck, and Russell Kirk, developed conservative responses to unprecedented and threatening events domestically and internationally. They shared basic assumptions about human nature and society, but their subjects, interpretations, conclusions, and prescriptions were independent and idiosyncratic. Uniquely close to powerful political figures, each historian also spoke directly to a large public, who bought their books, read their contributions to newspapers and journals, listened to them on the radio, and watched them on television. Additionally, the book addresses the dominance of both conservatism and Conservatism in 20th‐century Britain and the delayed development in America, until the Reagan ascendancy, of both a Conservative party and popular conservatism.

Giving an historical perspective on the changes in scientific thought over the last 100 years, this book explores the study of social evolution and the ongoing search for human nature. The book provides a detailed perspective on the reasons behind the shifting emphasis in social thought from biology, to culture, and again to biology. The book examines why these changes took place, the evidence and people fostering these changes and why students of human nature decided to accept this momentous change in thought. It suggests varying ideologies as the underlying force behind this shift in the study of social science. From Darwin's theory that human social behaviour has drastically evolved from animals, to the belief that human experience serves as the basic differentiating factor in humans, this book provides an examination of the roots of human behaviour.

What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilisation without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. This book highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, this study situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. It argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors—Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others—this book emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy.

During the years leading up to World War I, America experienced a crisis of civic identity. How could a country founded on liberal principles and composed of increasingly diverse cultures unite to safeguard individuals and promote social justice? This book tells the story of a group of American intellectuals who believed the solution to this crisis lay in rethinking the meaning of liberalism. Intellectuals such as William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, and W. E. B. Du Bois repudiated liberalism's association with acquisitive individualism and laissez-faire economics, advocating a model of liberal citizenship whose virtues and commitments amount to what the book calls cosmopolitan patriotism. Rooted not in war but in dedication to social equity, cosmopolitan patriotism favored the fight against sexism, racism, and political corruption in the United States over battles against foreign foes. Its adherents held the domestic and foreign policy of the United States to its own democratic ideals and maintained that promoting democracy universally constituted the ultimate form of self-defense. Perhaps most important, the cosmopolitan patriots regarded critical engagement with one's country as the essence of patriotism, thereby justifying scrutiny of American militarism in wartime.

Marsilius of Padua is conventionally considered to be ahead of his time as the first secular political theorist, the first post-classical thinker to espouse republicanism, and a scholastic precursor of the civic humanists of the renaissance. This book attempts to overturn this view, by advancing the first historical interpretation of Marsilius's thought. It examines the neglected evidence for Marsilius's life, and for contemporary responses to his best-known work, Defensor Pacis. Particular attention is given to the second discourse of the Defensor, which tends to receive short shrift in modern scholarly discussions; detailed comparison is also made with Marsilius's lesser-known works. The book argues that Marsilius was not a republican, but an imperialist, and a loyal servant of Ludwig IV, rex Romanorum and claimant to the imperial title. Far from being a precocious work of secular political theory, the Defensor Pacis is an anti-papal polemic underpinned by a profound Christian understanding of history as a providentially ordained process. In this process Marsilius attributes great significance to the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, as the point when the church founded by Christ and the Roman Empire began to coalesce.