Welcome to The Carryall

What’s in The Carryall, you ask?

No specific journal of US cultural or intellectual history exists, even though cultural and intellectual history suffuse both academic and general interest publications in the United States. By serving as what Alfred Kazin called an “intellectual carryall” for “critical inquiry, lay philosophy, the intellectual conscience,” we hope to provide a forum where the scholarly fields of US cultural and intellectual history connect to broader inquiries into questions of culture, ideas, and understandings of the past.

A carryall is, of course, a bag, but it is not just a grab bag. It can hold a lot, but it tries to put its contents into meaningful, purposeful order. A carryall can also be a small vehicle. It can even refer to an earth mover. We strive to live up to all those metaphors by offering a place to study American culture and ideas in (and beyond) the United States. We aim to tote, haul, and push along the rigorous study of culture and ideas productively and satisfyingly, in well-written prose, multimedia modes of argument, and other styles and forms.

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To dig in, our inaugural roundtable, “More (and Sometimes More Important) Ideas That Made America,” features explorations of United States intellectual history that expand upon the first survey of the field in over 40 years, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s 2019 book, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History. Rather than a series of nitpicking or overly celebratory book reviews, writers instead offer alternatives, riffs, variations, objections, and extensions of Ratner-Rosenhagen’s short introductory text, using it as a springboard for bigger, fuller, wider-ranging views of what US intellectual history is, is not, and might be.

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What can you do? You can pitch us ideas for roundtables, essays, posts, columns, and features; you can join us as a Contributing Editor, Correspondent, or Editorial Assistant Intern; you can write a letter to the editor about something you read in The Carryall; you can subscribe to our newsletter; and you can support us financially if you are able to do so.

Want to know more? Continued at “Editor’s Note: What’s Our Bag?”