The American Intellectual Tradition: Volume I: 1630-1865

By Charles Capper

Book Overview

Revised and updated, the sixth edition of this now standard two-volume anthology brings together some of the most historically significant writings in American intellectual history. Uniquely comprehensive, The American Intellectual Tradition includes classic works in philosophy, religion, social theory, political thought, economics, psychology, and cultural and literary criticism. Organized chronologically into thematic sections, the two volumes trace the evolution of American intellectual writing and thinking from its origins in Puritan beliefs to the most recent essays on diversity and postmodernity. Pedagogical features include introductions and headnotes to the selections, updated bibliographic material throughout, and detailed chronologies at the end of each book. Addressing such highly contested subjects as race, class, gender, aesthetics, political religion, and the role of the United States in the world, The American Intellectual Tradition, Sixth Edition, is invaluable for undergraduate courses in intellectual history. It is also an excellent supplement for graduate seminars and classes in American history, American studies, and American literature.

Volumes I and II now offer new selections from Charles Chauncy, Lester Frank Ward, Joseph Wood Krutch, David Lilienthal, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Peter Drucker, Ayn Rand, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Harold John Ockenaga, C. Wright Mills, Harold Cruse, John Rawls, Catherine Mackinnon, Sam Harris, and Stewart Brand. The sixth edition also offers updated and expanded commentary and citations in the introductions and headnotes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195392922
• ISBN13: 9780195392920
• Release Date: January 2011
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 1.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.0" x 1.3" 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.