Growing up in Philadelphia, with school and family visits to landmarks like Independence Hall and Betsy Ross’s house, I’ve long been interested in American history. That led me, eventually, to graduate school and my profession as a historian. At the same time, I have greatly enjoyed reading American novelists, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willa Cather, and James Baldwin, as well as the works of thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. DuBois. The sweet spot combining those two interests has been American intellectual history.
I wrote...
A Mirror for History: How Novels and Art Reflect the Evolution of Middle-Class America
This book showed me how engaging, intellectual history can be written. It’s never enough to present information. If you respect your readers, as Delbanco does, keep them entertained. These twelve essays mix the personal, literary, and social in a lively and often surprising, frothy brew. I also like the way Delbanco makes the distant past relevant for today’s world.
Individual sentences are a delight. You’ll leave the book knowing much more about the life, times, and work of writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright.
Time and again, I come
back to this work of criticism because of its daring arguments. Fiedler attempts nothing less than a
comparison of American fiction with English, French, and Russian literature.
If
some of his arguments will leave you scratching your head, others will make you
look at novels from an entirely different perspective and provide a new
understanding of works you thought you knew.
Lengthy analyses of Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn help to illustrate the duplicity with which themes of love and death are treated in American fiction
No book has influenced my study of intellectual history more than Hauser’s work. His Social History is an enormous undertaking and is divided into four volumes. It covers the period from cave art to early movies.
Dip into it to read about Shakespeare, Rembrandt, or Tolstoy. What I find so impressive is the nuanced and convincing way Hauser relates changes in society to artistic creation.
First published in 1951 Arnold Hausers commanding work presents an account of the development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone Age through to the Film Age. Exploring the interaction between art and society, Hauser effectively details social and historical movements and sketches the frameworks in which visual art is produced.
This new edition provides an excellent introduction to the work of Arnold Hauser. In his general introduction to The Social History of Art, Jonathan Harris asseses the importance of the work for contemporary art history and visual culture. In addition, an introduction to each volume provides…
It’s hard to praise this work too highly. It’s a lovely volume, lavishly illustrated. But what I like best about American Visions is Hughes’s singular voice.
Hughes's judgments are sure-footed and well-researched, and his tone is conversational. He is a guide you can rely on from the painters of the colonial period through the installations of the 1990s.
Writing with all the brilliance, authority, and pungent wit that have distinguished his art criticism for Time magazine and his greatly acclaimed study of modern art, The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes now addresses his largest subject: the history of art in America.
The intense relationship between the American people and their surroundings has been the source of a rich artistic tradition. American Visions is a consistently revealing demonstration of the many ways in which artists have expressed this pervasive connection. In nine eloquent chapters, which span the whole range of events, movements, and personalities of more than three…
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
This is my candidate for the Great American Novel. Read it for its storyline and its fascinating chapters on whales. Along the way, you’ll encounter discussions about race, religion, friendship, and the virtuous life.
Some of my students ask, “Why does Melville digress so much?” My response: persist in reading this work. What at first seems extraneous becomes vital. You’ll discover a masterpiece.
Melville's tale of the whaling industry, and one captain's obsession with revenge against the Great White Whale that took his leg. Classics Illustrated tells this wonderful tale in colourful comic strip form, offering an excellent introduction for younger readers. This edition also includes a biography of Herman Melville and study questions, which can be used both in the classroom or at home to further engage the reader in the work at hand.
How have Americans viewed themselves and their world? With that question in mind, I embarked on a fourteen-year quest to read hundreds of novels to discover the changing ways authors portrayed society and individuals.
I look at works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with its depiction of the 1920s, as well as books like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which–in reimagining slavery–casts light on the 1980s. This study, which ranges from 1750 to 2020, also explores painting and shows how its evolution parallels that of literature.
In the bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the first —and to date only— Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000…
Robin dreamed of attending Yale and using her brain. Kory lived on the streets of Seattle and relied on his brawn. Without the asteroid, they never would have met.
For three years, Robin and her grandfather have been hiding, trusting no one. When a biker gang moves into town, Robin…
