Introduction: The Life of the Mind in the Early Republic

Abstract:This essay introduces the five articles of this issue’s special forum on American intellectual history in the early republic. Including other recent works in the field, the essay evaluates how current scholarship diverges from or corrects the conventional narrative that has centered elite Anglo-Protestant intellectuals from the beginning of the discipline until recently. Defining terms including “America” and “intellectual” is crucial to understanding the various contributions and how they collectively turn away from American exceptionalism, a progressive view of American history, the notion of a collective American mind, and the acceptance of intellectual authority or elite status as indicative of historical value. Indigenous, African American, Catholic, Mexican-American, and Californiana voices reveal American thinkers who were skeptical of Anglo-Protestant premises, had perspectives worth considering, and made contributions to the history of American thought even while historians ignored them. The current generation of scholarship in American intellectual history marks a major revision of the last great disciplinary revision of the field after the rise of the new social history. Yet despite this promise, the institutional deterioration of higher education in the United States imperils the field.