Opening thoughts from the editor of The Carryall.
Dig In
We begin The Carryall with an inaugural roundtable focused on Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s 2019 book, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief Survey. Ratner-Rosenhagen has written the first survey of US intellectual history in many decades, but it is a self-admittedly “brief” book, meant to give new readers, perhaps students most of all, a means of entry—a gateway—into the field.
Rather than publish a series of conventional book reviews pointing out all that is missing from the text, over 15 historians decided to embrace the skeletal, introductory nature of the introductory genre in which Ratner-Rosenhagen writes. What would it mean not only to critique or celebrate The Ideas That Made America‘s accomplishments, but also to propose variations, alternatives, riffs, and new directions for the field? What have been the “More (and Sometimes More Important) Ideas That Made America”? Our writers have some propositions and ideas to share.
To Carry(all) Ideas and Culture Forward
What about The Carryall as a whole? What are we up to and what are our goals?
Because history itself is an idea, a mode of thinking, a conceptual approach to organizing human experience, intellectual history as a subfield is at once everywhere and nowhere. One might say that every historian is always writing intellectual history. Of course, the field has had a reputation, sometimes rightfully, for tracking only the ideas of elites. So too intellectual history comes under fire for downplaying the more material, economic, political, social, structural, or resistant aspects of the past. Yet, intellectual history itself has increasingly addressed these shortcomings. Practitioners have turned to ideas in the contexts of institutional life. They have connected abstraction and ideology to embodiment and social relations. They have brought sophisticated theories to bear on empirical data—and vice-versa. Nonetheless, because in some sense all history is intellectual history, many historians ignore the specific field. They do so, we would argue, at their peril.
As with ideas, so too with culture. In historical inquiry, it shows up everywhere, as a causal factor, as a contextual dimension, as a murky sideshow either running in parallel to politics or economics or social relations or determined by these other forces. Like ideas, culture can seem to be once everywhere and, oddly, nowhere in historical inquiry. It becomes an atmosphere that at once incorporates everything around us—becoming the very air we breathe—and yet also develops an amorphous quality, intangible enough to dissipate when analyzed more rigorously. Because it is so basic and present, culture vanishes into the mists of time.
We are all cultural and intellectual historians now, say some scholars of the American past. That can be fine. Let a thousand intellectual and cultural flowers bloom across the landscape of historical inquiry; but an anything-goes, casual approach to cultural and intellectual history has also, unfortunately, produced mediocre work. Historians easily mishandle the interpretation of complex aesthetic texts: a film or song lyric reduced to a simplistic echo of a political candidate’s victory. The culture of working-class people gets treated as a mere manifestation of economic factors. Ideas and thinking get treated as isolated from the context of other ideas across time and place.
Many historians now claim to incorporate intellectual or cultural history into their repertoires, no sweat! In the process, however, have we lost some of the precision with which intellectual and cultural history emerged as particular approaches to the study of the past? Decades after the “cultural turn” in US history, after the “turning” of cultural history, and even longer since the supposed demise of intellectual history, might we bring the approaches, sensibilities, and findings of these subfields back into focus? Might we even push them forward in exciting new directions?
Currently, no academic journal exists that is dedicated exclusively to US cultural or intellectual history. Developing at least one space dedicated to these approaches seems a worthy pursuit. Ideas and culture simply matter too much. They might even matter the most. To be sure, politics, economics, social relations, the nature we study as the environment—these are important. Why? In part because these terms provide conceptual ideas for the study of the past. A culture of analysis, of assumptions and frameworks and modes of reasoning, accrues around them. Why not then give ideas and culture their due?
Without a clearer sense of how intellectual and cultural history function as particular fields, the larger project of understanding the past—its meanings, its qualities, its causalities, its forces, its correlations, its contexts, its presences and absences, its positioning back then and why it still matters now—suffers. Without careful scrutiny of culture and ideas, we have no culture in which to access the past itself and no idea what history even is.
A Precise Focus and a Wide Net
The Carryall aims to address the missing place of cultural and intellectual history in the current ecosystem of historical scholarship, but in doing so it also casts a wide net. Our “bag” includes classic approaches to the subfields, but also new and experimental ones. We aim to catch culture and ideas in play across art, law, music, economics, dance, architecture, identity, class, the state, vernacular life, politics, and whatever it is we might even call the not-political. Whatever might interest our writers and editors and readers, we aim to commission, publish, edit, and share.
We also view intellectual and cultural history as modes of social criticism, taking inspiration from Alfred Kazin’s remark that “criticism has been the great American lay philosophy, the intellectual conscience and the intellectual carryall.” A carryall can be a bag, but it can also be a vehicle, like a cart. It can even be an earth mover, like a bulldozer. Our goal is to harness all of these metaphors to carry(all) forward the practices of cultural and intellectual historical analysis.
We publish on an open-source website, embracing the possibilities for intellectual and cultural history to serve as platforms for scholarly thinking in public. We also want to see if we can take better advantage of the multimedia and networked capacities of online writing, bringing them in not as bells and whistles, but as new forms of argumentation, analysis, explanation, and communication.
While we strive to become a venue for the exploration of ideas and culture in the US American past in particular, we also must cast a suspicious eye at reductive uses of the unit of the nation and the concept of national history. We know that US cultural and intellectual history needs perspectives that are transnational and global, that cross boundaries and disciplines and perspectives. A simplistic “exceptionalist” American framework will not do. Our goal is to bring the actual, empirical history of the United States as a nation into connection and conversation with other frameworks. Rather than spin myths, we seek to ask new questions by holding nation and other configurations of association, collision, and interaction up against each other. To this end, we will be collaborating with the Transatlantic Cultures project, a Brazilian-French-led effort to study the cultural history of the Atlantic world. We hope to form connections to other non-US-centric voices as well.
Based at a regional comprehensive public university, the State University of New York’s Brockport campus, located outside Rochester, New York, The Carryall also strives to connect US cultural and intellectual history more robustly to teaching and education. Our “How To Teach…” feature allows writers to connect their published books and essays anywhere, not just at The Carryall, to strategies for teaching their findings to undergraduates and graduate students or even secondary school students. “How To Teach…” also allows writers to offer ideas for teaching particular artifacts, subjects, events, time periods, theories, and the like. Our “Syllabi” feature spotlights one syllabus in US cultural or intellectual history, broadly conceived. We offer opportunities for students to learn about digital scholarly editing and US cultural and intellectual history as well through our Correspondents Program and our Editorial Internship opportunities.
Three final goals of The Carryall.
First, we hope to provide opportunities for interested scholars and thinkers to conceptualize and bring to fruition roundtables on topics they wish to explore further. See our Contributing Editor opportunities if you are interested in proposing a roundtable or serving as a Contributing Editor.
Second, for writers, we offer extensive editorial feedback, through peer review when requested and from our editorial staff in all cases.
Finally, for readers, we have chosen a “Letter to the Editor” model of response rather than comment threads, which have sadly languished in the age of bots and sock puppets. That said, in coming years, we hope to develop a membership-model space for online conversation to complement our open-source publishing.
What’s Next?
Beyond our inaugural roundtable, The Carryall will be slowly but steadily toward full publication in 2025. We are not concerned with roaring out of the gate, but rather with achieving sustainability as a place for scholarship, criticism, inquiry, old squabbles, new ideas, and more. Stick with us as we begin to publish long-form articles both peer-reviewed and essayistic, both submitted and commissioned, as well as short-form features such as columns, interviews, annotated documents, syllabi, how to teach essays, digital storytelling and multimedia approaches, a podcast, and, in time, a new database of primary sources in US intellectual and cultural history we are developing, The Carryall Reader. The last project will take time to bring to fruition, but when ready, it will allow us to bring into the digital age the spirit of The American Intellectual Tradition two-volume print compendium of primary sources edited by David Hollinger and Charles Capper.
There are numerous ways you can contribute to The Carryall.
You can write us a letter to the editor; pitch us ideas for roundtables, essays, posts, columns, features, interviews, or some other concept; join us as a Contributing Editor, Correspondent, or Editorial Assistant Intern; subscribe to our newsletter; and support us financially if you are able to do so.
We look forward to expanding the community of scholars, students, readers, and interested thinkers who want to comprehend more compellingly how culture and ideas have mattered to a capacious, critical understanding of the United States and its place in the world.
— Michael J. Kramer, Editor