The German ethnologist Gustav Klemm (1802–67) occupies a rather problematic position in the history of ideas, alternately hailed as a seminal figure in the development of concepts of race and culture, or belittled as a rather derivative marginal thinker. This article seeks to clarify Klemm's significance by rooting his theories in their contemporary intellectual and social context. It argues that his system, a linear model of human development driven by the interworkings of race and culture, grew from an attempt to synthesize Enlightenment notions of universal progress with major shifts of the mid-nineteenth century, including experiences of dramatic social, political and technological change, commitments to constitutional liberalism, and changes in contemporary ethnology and museology. His works therefore illustrate the complex manners in which ideas of heredity, environment, civilization, development and gender could be blended in this often neglected period, and how their meanings and implications altered as syntheses were built.

As the foundational contributions of the fin de siècle sexual science movement to research on sexuality continue to be fleshed out, new avenues of understanding this important movement will continue to emerge. This essay uncovers the explosive intersection of early sexual science and strains of first-wave feminism in Vienna and charts the emergence of anti-essentialist feminism from this intersection. The first section offers an interpretation of how the discipline of sexual science emerged from medical criminology and how these origins contributed to the misogynist inflection of early sexology. The essay then chronicles the intersection of first-wave feminism and this misogynist sexual science. The central argument is that feminists’ encounters with sexual science dialectically produced an anti-essentialist variant of feminism. This microscopic interpretation of historical context, it will be argued, provides a new vista from which to view the larger tableau of modern European, especially Austrian, intellectual history.

Antiquity is back. In some respects, it is surprising it ever went away: for the last forty years, Peter Gay's magisterial survey, which connected the “little flock” of philosophes with “pagan” authors, has loomed large over the field of Enlightenment studies. But shortly after its publication, a methodological sea change pulled the field in an opposite direction. Robert Darnton hailed this rising tide of social and cultural history in a 1971 largely critical review of Gay's two volumes. The hyper-longue durée of Gay's historical panorama, which extended from the age of Virgil to that of Voltaire, was soon to be displaced by more focused inquiries into the history of the book, forms of enlightened sociability, and national difference. Intellectual history, particularly of Gay's epic brand, soon became scarce, despite the lasting presence of Gay's two volumes on bibliographies and course syllabi.

Anyone who works at the interstices of intellectual history and philosophy and the history and philosophy of science will be quick to rank Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions amongst the most influential works of the last half-century. But its influence extends well beyond these disciplines as well. First published in 1962 as a contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, over the last fifty years it has enjoyed a rich afterlife, leaving in its wake an immense if contested inventory of ideas whose significance has transcended the well-policed boundaries that often separate the natural sciences from the social sciences and the humanities. Even more surprising for a book of its academic character, it has enjoyed a reception in popular discourse that exceeds its disciplinary bailiwick. Its trademark terms—not only the celebrated ideas of a paradigm and a paradigm shift but also more technical themes such as normal science, incommensurability, and anomaly—have been naturalized into mundane English with a degree of success that puts to shame just about any other work of recent scholarship. Paraphrasing one of its characteristic claims, one may be temped to observe that, since the publication of Kuhn's Structure, we all live in a different world.

Initially trained as a physicist, Kuhn became a leading and extraordinarily influential figure in the history of science. He saw his work in the history of science as contributing to a novel philosophical conception of the nature of science. At the outset of Structure, for example, Kuhn announces his intention to replace the “development-by-accumulation” model he associates with the philosophical tradition before him—including, in particular, what he calls “early logical positivism”—with a new model of radical conceptual discontinuity or incommensurability. Structure was written during Kuhn's tenure teaching philosophy and history of science at Berkeley, and, shortly after its publication, he took up a new post as professor of philosophy and history of science at Princeton. From 1983 until his death in 1996 Kuhn was professor of philosophy at MIT, where he attempted further to articulate his conception of incommensurability, taking account of developments in linguistics and philosophy of language.

Among the topics discussed in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, those of education, training, and pedagogy are apt to seem the least compelling. Certainly, the earliest debates about Structure focused on other, more controversial, matters: incommensurability, meaning change, the rationality of theory choice, normal science—the list goes on. Over the past two decades, however, a growing concern among historians and sociologists of science with the nature of scientific apprenticeship has stimulated greater appreciation of the importance of questions of teaching and learning to the philosophical position sketched in Structure. This paper seeks to develop further our understanding of these issues as they bear on Kuhn's theory of science.

Bilingualism was Kuhn's solution to the problem of relativism, the problem raised by his own theory of incommensurability. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific theories are separated by gulfs of mutual incomprehension. There is no neutral ground from which to judge one theory fitter than another. Each is formulated in its own language and cannot be translated into the idiom of another. Yet, like many Americans, Kuhn never had the experience of moving comfortably between languages. “I've never been any good really at foreign languages,” he admitted in an interview soon before his death. “I can read French, I can read German, if I'm dropped into one of those countries I can stammer along for a while, but my command of foreign languages is not good, and never has been, which makes it somewhat ironic that much of my thought these days goes to language.” Kuhn may have been confessing to more than a personal weakness. His linguistic ineptitude seems to be a clue to his overweening emphasis on the difficulty of “transworld travel.” Multilingualism remained for him an abstraction. In this respect, I will argue, Kuhn engendered a peculiarly American turn in the history of science. Kuhn's argument for the dependence of science on the norms of particular communities has been central to the development of studies of science in and as culture since the 1980s. Recent work on the mutual construction of science and nationalism, for instance, is undeniably in Kuhn's debt. Nonetheless, the Kuhnian revolution cut off other avenues of research. In this essay, I draw on the counterexample of the physician–historian Ludwik Fleck, as well as on critiques by Steve Fuller and Ted Porter, to suggest one way to situate Kuhn within the broader history of the history of science. To echo Kuhn's own visual metaphors, one of the profound effects of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the field of history of science was to render certain modes of knowledge production virtually invisible.

When did historians begin to put quotation marks around the word real? There are many examples of this habit and some of them will be set forth as evidence in what follows. But before doing so we might ask a preliminary question: What are the quotation marks themselves supposed to mean? Today we find them so familiar they hardly need to be written and they are more frequently consigned to the everyday repertoire of silent gesture: two fingers on either hand clutch at the air as if they meant to tickle the flanks of the invisible beast between them. The popular term is “scare-quotes,” a pun on the word “scarecrow.” Its etymology is revealing: just as a mere representation of a body in a field may scare off birds, so too scare-quotes permit someone to deploy a word without sincere commitment to what it normally means. But further reflection tells us that the effects are not so similar after all: To use a term without sincerity robs it of its original meaning and holds up its lifeless corpse to ridicule. The more knowing sort of crow can settle on the shoulder of the figure on the pole precisely because it recognizes that such a sorry excuse for a man can in fact harm no one. Similarly when one puts reality in quotation marks (thus: “reality”) we are put in mind of the living concept but we are immediately alerted to the fact that, for the user at least, the new term enjoys no metaphysical prestige. How did this happen? When and why did the single most privileged word in the entire lexicon of metaphysics begin to lose its authority such that in certain spheres of intellectual sophistication its sincere use would only seem an embarrassment and a sign of naïveté?

The following essays present six distinct but broadly compatible narratives of scholarship in United States intellectual history over the past half-century: postwar dominance, a season of despair, and then the field's rise, transformation, and expansion. The essays are a feast of erudition; any reader will come away from them with a list of “must-read” books. But there is much more here. These are rigorous and sophisticated explorations—at once historical and prescriptive—of a flourishing field. The writers span different generations, with authors representative of older, middling, and younger scholars. These appraisals are various yet they are unambiguously within the mainstream, tracking the current understandings of the somewhat fuzzy boundaries of the field. While additional writers might have further enriched the coverage, these writers together offer a fair representation of current practice in the field.

The story of American intellectual history's decline, fall, and phoenix-like rebirth in recent decades has become trite with the retelling: knocked from its position of prominence by the new social history and plunged into the chastened soul-searching of the famed Wingspread Conference of 1977, only to find itself rescued in part by the linguistic and cultural “turns” that swept the entire discipline of American history in the 1980s and 1990s. Like many a narrative, this one undoubtedly imposes too clear a pattern of meaning on a messier reality, but also like many a narrative, it has powerfully shaped the professional identities of American intellectual historians by giving them a sense of where they have been and how they arrived at their current place. That current place is a hospitable one, in many ways, for in the last couple of decades American historians seem to have grown increasingly receptive to the notion that ideas have mattered in history.

Unlike the memory of the querulous and time-bending White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, mine befits her complaint, inclined as I am to thinking backwards when asked to contemplate the state of our field. Backwards, then, I go in the first section of this essay, after a few opening comments on the situation of our field at the present moment. Thereafter, I describe the emergence of cultural history and summarize some of its strengths and weaknesses, to the end of reflecting on its implications for intellectual history.

These selected excerpts from a conversation now running nearly a quarter-century about The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook exemplify the efforts made by specialists in American intellectual history to decide just what constitutes the core of their field. An anthology designed for undergraduates has practical limitations, to be sure, that prevent its table of contents from ever serving as a complete map of a field. Specific research questions, not arguments over canons, properly remain the deepest center of gravity of any cohort of scholars. But assignments to students are one important indicator of what scholar–teachers take to be important, and these assignments are not unrelated to choices these same individuals make about the topics of their monographic contributions. Hence the lively correspondence that my coeditor, Charles Capper, and I have carried on with dozens of colleagues concerning the six editions of the only collection of sources for this field currently in print offers a window on how American intellectual history has changed in the last generation and what are its current directions.

American intellectual history in the future will be embodied, embedded, and extended. Building on a sturdy foundation of past practices, intellectual historians will consolidate the advances of the last half-century and continue to study ideas articulated in multiple registers, by multiple historical actors, for multiple purposes.

In January 1969, just before his inauguration as president, Richard M. Nixon attended a concert in his honor at Constitution Hall. The program consisted entirely of works by American composers, including Howard Hanson, then the director of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Hanson's choral work “Song of Democracy,” a setting of two excerpts from poems by Walt Whitman, was the last number of the evening. Here is New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg's commentary on the event, which featured the National Symphony Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir:

Intellectual history in the United States has long borne a peculiarly close kinship to social history. The twin fields rose together a century ago in a filial revolt against the cloistered, conservative study of political institutions. Sharing a progressive interest in social thought and social reform, they joined in the self-styled “social and intellectual history” of the interwar decades. After mid-century, however, they moved in divergent directions. Many social historians adopted the quantitative methods of the social sciences, documenting the diverse experiences of workers, women, immigrants, slaves, native peoples, and others often marginalized in the textual record as well as the property regimes, modes of production, patterns of inheritance and mobility, and large-scale demographic and environmental forces that governed their lives. Intellectual historians tended to favor the qualitative evidence gleaned from the more cohesive letters and libraries of traditional elites, specializing in close readings of the intricate discursive, aesthetic, and spiritual templates of social experience found in religion, science, philosophy, political theory, and art and literature. Both subdisciplines had come into parallel crises by the 1980s, chastened by postmodern attacks on “master narratives” of any kind, whether idealist or materialist. In the decades since, social historians have sought a more nuanced consideration of thought and culture, while intellectual historians have at once broadened the range of their subjects and sources and limited more carefully the claims they make for them.