The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebookvolume I: 1630-1865

by Charles Capper

Book Overview

The third edition of this uniquely comprehensive two-volume anthology contains many of the most significant documents in American intellectual history. It includes new selections from a diverse group of authors that cover Puritan theology, communitarian thought, racial ideology, gender theory, cultural criticism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. The extensive chronology has been revised and expanded to connect over a thousand important books,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195097254
• ISBN13: 9780195097252
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Compendium of American Thought

This volume by Hollinger and Capper is the first of two in their ambitious goal to "round up" and compile a representative sampling of documents in American Intellectual History. They succeed brilliantly.Volume I logically starts with the Pilgrims and ends with the Civil War and is divided neatly into component chapters with contributions from John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards ("Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is just breathtaking...), Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams (the founding fathers section), on through Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Transcendentalism), to Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, Martin Delaney, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.The editors provide a small biographical sketch of each author that precedes the selection and the selections track a wide range of issues including race relations, relations between the North and the South, the enfranchisement of women, American exceptionalism (Winthrop's "City on a Hill"), the formation of the United States, transcendentalism (the seedling for America's first original philosophy, Pragmatism). These issues are picked up later and expanded (or concluded) in Volume II of the work.