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

By Charles Capper

Book Overview

Revised and expanded, the second edition of this uniquely comprehensive two-volume anthology of many of the most significant documents in American intellectual history offers new selections from a diversity of authors; an extensive chronology connecting several hundred important books and essays with events in American and European intellectual, cultural, and political history; and updated bibliographies and headnotes. The anthology makes readily available substantial selections from the writings of prominent American thinkers, ranged chronologically from the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 to the present. Designed for easy use by a wide range of readers, it is an invaluable reader for anyone interested in intellectual history, American history, American studies, or American literature.
Volume I (to 1865) now offers new selections by Sarah M. Grimk , Horace Bushnell, and Louisa S. McCord, and Volume II (1865-present) now offers new selections by Charles Hodge, Henry Adams, George Santayana, W.E.B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, H.L. Mencken, John Crowe Ransom, Meridel Le Sueur, Reinhold Niebuhr, Ralph Ellison, Whittaker Chambers, Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich, Evelyn Fox Keller, Richard Rorty, and Michael Walzer.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195077792
• ISBN13: 9780195077797
• Release Date: March 1993
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 488 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.1"

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.