Introducing the inaugural roundtable for The Carryall.
It is no small thing to write a small thing.
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen has published a “brief history” of US intellectual history, the first such survey since the mid-twentieth century. The book is at once sweeping and, as it must, sweeps a lot under the rug. With what she calls “voice and vision” Ratner-Rosenhagen tries to navigate a mansion of thought. Come in, she announces to newcomers, students especially, and you’ll like what you find in this capacious space, even if we are only breezing through it and spending but a brief time in each room.
It is a noble effort, and, as our roundtable shows, it is successful on many levels, but most of all, as a brief survey, The Ideas That Made America offers an opportunity not merely to notice all the chips in the paint or the crooked floorboards below or what is not featured in the mansion and left to the outbuildings, but also to think more deeply and broadly about US intellectual history as a whole. The point of the roundtable is not to trash the book, but rather to see what else can be made of its framework.
In the inaugural roundtable for The Carryall, therefore, we have asked a diverse set of scholars not so much to review The Ideas That Made America, but rather to use it as an entry point, a proverbial springboard, for further inquiry. Some respondents have chosen to expand Ratner-Rosenhagen’s overarching thesis, which places primacy of focus on the rise of pragmatism as a distinctively American philosophy. Others repaint the walls and renovate the halls, reimagining particular rooms with different aesthetics and perspectives than hers. Still others ask us to leave her book altogether for alternate structures.
Overall, the roundtable seeks to expand upon Ratner-Rosenhagen’s brief history by offering “More (And Sometimes More Important) Ideas That Made America.” We hope the results from over 15 scholars will let scholars, teachers, students, and interested citizens delve further into the rich range of US intellectual history in its contemporary state. One can pair these essays with the book in a course or read them along with Ratner-Rosenhagen’s text on your own. Or just read each essays in its own right, as an independent work of scholarship and commentary. However one approaches the roundtable, there is no one story that marks the ideas that made America. That is how it should be. The landscape is simply too complex for that, the edifices, designs, hollows, and vistas simply too wide-ranging and interesting for one narrative of US intellectual history to do.
“More (And Sometimes More Important) Ideas That Made America” will move sequentially through Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book over the coming weeks. We are delighted to publish these essays at The Carryall. Among the contributors are: Richard Cándida Smith, Roberto Breña, David Farber, Aubrey Lauersdorf, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Mark G. Schmeller, Sarah Naramore, Hunter Moskowitz, Kevin B. Sheets, Thomas N. Baker, Alyssa Quintanilla, Abigail Modaff, Paul Murphy, Guy Emerson Mount, Victoria W. Wolcott, Shannan Clark, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Joshua L. Crutchfield, David Austin Walsh, Audrey Wu Clark, Robert Greene II, Emily Hawk, Brandon James Render, and Johann N. Neem.