Customer Reviews

The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook Volume II: 1865 to the Present

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Volume II of Hollinger and Capper's work is as excellent as the first.

Volume II contains contributions from American writers such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan Sontag, Malcolm X, Rienhold Niebuhr, Noam Chomsky, John Crowe Ransom, Betty Friedan, John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois, H.L. Mencken, Jane Addams, Woodrow Wilson, Samuel Huntington, etc.

Volume II traces the developments of race relations in America, the advancement of minorities and women in America, American foreign relations, insight into the state of the South after the Civil War, the effect of transportation revolutions on interstate travel as well as traces the development of Pragmatism, America's contribution to the world of Philosophy from Charles Sanders Peirce to William James to Thomas Kuhn to Richard Rorty.

Simply put, the topical treatment of this work is first rate and the collection of these various works is a creditable contribution to the field of American Intellectual History.

This book is a solid collection of primary sources on American intellectual history. As such, it should come as no surprise that reading it is by no means easy, and that's just fine. But what's not fine is that the editors don't give you much help. Strictly speaking, it's not necessarily their job to provide context for the sources; all the same, I felt that they could have made more of an effort to do so given the difficulty of the sources. I realize that the point of reading primary sources is to come to your own conclusions, but that's awfully difficult to do if you know little or nothing about the documents' contexts. Hollinger and Capper provide a paragraph or so of context before each reading, but for me, someone whose knowledge of American history isn't particularly deep, this paragraph wasn't enough. This all means that if you're studying American intellectual history, you'll probably need something more than this book, such as more general (text)books and/or a lecture course that can help you with context. If you happen to be stuck in a classroom setting where you have to try to "make sense" of this brick on your own or through discussions with equally novice peers, god help you.

Solid academic overview of American Thought that is actually written thoughtfully enough to warrant keeping it beyond the classroom requirement.