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

By Charles Capper

Book Overview

The fourth edition of this uniquely comprehensive two-volume anthology has been expanded to connect over a thousand important books, essays, and artistic works with events in American and European intellectual, cultural, and political history. After extensive consultation with instructors who assign these volumes to students, the editors have revised this edition to include more discussions of religion, psychology, social theory, gender, ethnicity, and the role of the United States in the world. Ranging chronologically from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 to the present, The American Intellectual Tradition, 4/e, is invaluable for courses in intellectual history and an excellent supplement for classes in American history, American studies, and American literature.
Volume I now offers new selections from Jonathan Edwards, "Brutus," Judith Sargent Murray, William Ellery Channing, Nathaniel William Taylor, Charles Grandison Finney, William Lloyd Garrison, Orestes Brownson, Martin Delany and Margaret Fuller; and includes writings of John Winthrop, John Cotton, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Sarah Grimk , George Bancroft, Catharine Beecher, Henry C. Carey, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Bushnell, Herman Melville, John C. Calhoun, Louisa McCord, George Fitzhugh, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195137205
• ISBN13: 9780195137200
• Release Date: February 2001
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 1.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.1" x 1.1" 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.