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The American Mind Is Dead, Long Live the American Mind
Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2020-04-27 , DOI: 10.1017/s147924432000013x
Amy Kittelstrom

The story of American intellectual history has a mythic quality: a slow beginning, a rise to great heights, and a precipitous fall. Early in the twentieth century, the study of American history and literature grew in American colleges and universities, after many years of teaching European ideas in lieu of an American canon. Then, from a literature department arose Vernon Louis Parrington and from an American studies department Perry Miller—their writing compelling, learned, and suggestive. Their books and their students established the new field of American intellectual history, drawing readers far and wide into their interpretations of how not just individuals but entire peoples had “minds” that hovered above society, transmitting ideas from the past and changing with the times. Miller pioneered this approach with The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, which became required reading for historians for decades—and ever since, for Puritan specialists. Miller used the published sermons of the most prominent theologians—and their European sources—to describe a crisis in Puritan thought over the character of their faith and therefore purpose. The concept of the regional or national mind became so popular that when Parrington's student Henry Steele Commager published The American Mind at mid-century, the book met a hungry public and went into eight printings in seven years.

中文翻译:

美国思想已死,美国思想万岁

美国思想史的故事具有神话般的品质:缓慢的开端、登峰造极的高峰和陡峭的坠落。在 20 世纪初,美国大学和大学对美国历史和文学的研究在多年教授欧洲思想而不是美国经典之后发展起来。然后,来自文学系的弗农·路易斯·帕林顿(Vernon Louis Parrington)和来自美国研究系的佩里·米勒(Perry Miller)出现——他们的作品引人入胜、博学而富有启发性。他们的书和他们的学生开创了美国思想史的新领域,将读者广泛地吸引到他们对不仅是个人而且整个民族如何拥有凌驾于社会之上的“思想”、传递过去的思想并与时俱进的解释中。米勒率先采用了这种方法新英格兰思想:十七世纪,几十年来一直是历史学家的必读书籍——从那以后,清教徒专家也必读。米勒使用最杰出的神学家发表的布道——以及他们的欧洲资料——来描述清教徒思想中关于他们信仰的性质和目的的危机。区域或国家思想的概念变得如此流行,以至于当帕灵顿的学生亨利斯蒂尔 Commager 发表美国人的心在本世纪中叶,这本书遇到了饥肠辘辘的公众,并在七年内印刷了八次。
更新日期:2020-04-27
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