Welcome to Volume 02 of The Carryall, crawling out to you this year.
Slowly But Surely
I sometimes joke that The Carryall should have been called The Tortoise. We move slowly. Of course, in Aesop’s Fables, the tortoise defeats the hare. May it also be so with The Carryall.
For the rollout (crawl out?) of our 2026 volume, our shell-backed, carryall-toting friend peeps his head out amidst the tempests and crises of 2026 to share with you a fine set of essays, interviews, roundtables, syllabi, columns, and more. We will be publishing our features over the coming weeks and months.
We begin with Scott Saul’s “Learning from Jorge Drexler.” The essay uses the music of the Uruguayan-born songwriter and musician, along with the recent book America, América: A New History of the New World by historian Greg Grandin, to ask what Latin American humanism might offer US cultural and intellectual history. What might a truly American—which is to say, Pan-American—intellectual and cultural history look like? Or sound like, for that matter? Saul takes from cruising the roads of South America on the back of Che Guevara’s motorcycle to walking up the aisles of the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. He connects the anticolonial ideas of Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas to the libraries of a cultured home in twentieth-century Montevideo to the elegant lyrics and multicultural polyrhythms of Jorge Drexler’s music itself in the early twenty-first. Overall, Saul argues that US cultural and intellectual historians might “approach the field with a more porous and less nationalistic framework—to rove past its borders and be prepared for surprises.”
Next up, Randall J. Stephens and Julian C. Chambliss interview Joe Street about his new book, Black Revolutionaries: A History of the Black Panther Party, which emphasizes the intellectual engagements with postcolonial theory as part of “Panther praxis,” among other revisions that Joe offers for this much-contested history.
The Carryall comes to you from the State University of New York’s Brockport campus, so we’re excited to bring you a discussion of the life, times, and continued legacy of Fannie Barrier Williams, the African American social reformer and Brockport native. Biographer Wanda Hendricks talks with gender and Africana studies scholar Brittney Cooper about Barrier Williams’ little-known career as a thinker, writer, and activist.
Three pieces by Jay Cook, Casey Blake, and Sandy Zipp reconsider the relationship between cultural history and intellectual history. Cook takes stock of the career of John Kasson (full disclosure: my doctoral advisor), whose investigations of technology, manners, amusement parks, theater, film, spectacle, and more remind us that popular culture reveals key aspects of intellectual life as much as any philosophical tracts or literary works. From his keynote address at the 2025 Society for U.S. Intellectual History conference in Detroit, Blake samples the art and aesthetics of the Motor City as a starting point for a more vibrant, art-infused version of intellectual history. Also arriving direct from the S-USIH Conference, Zipp muses about the possibilities opened up by The Carryall‘s inaugural roundtable, “More (and Sometimes More Important) Ideas That Made America,” suggesting that the responses to Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s survey of US intellectual history give us a chance to renew an old field: the cultural history of ideas.
In a roundtable that also originated at the S-USIH Conference, Audrey Clark, Fred Lee, Toni Hayes, Jennifer Cho, Edmond Y. Chang, and Martin Joseph Ponce explore the stakes of Asian American intellectual history as a subfield. Asian American Studies flourishes as a part of Ethnic Studies, but Asian American intellectual history has remained undertheorized. The roundtable addresses this lacuna by asking, through various case studies, what issues emerge when we move the conversation beyond tired tropes of Asian Americans as either a “yellow peril” or a “model minority”?
The Carryall‘s second volume also features the debut of Randall Stephens’s “Historiographics,” in which he creates a range of new “historical artifacts,” from U.S. historian baseball trading cards to album covers for famous books and other surrealistic presentations of historical practice. You could say he is playing the modern-day Situationist, employing a new, digital form of détournement to upend US cultural and intellectual history. On one level, his creations simply offer a giggle. They provide what he calls “fun with Photoshop.” Yet they are also suggestive—wry visual commentaries on intellectual history as a field. Continuing the theme of new and unexpected forms of intellectual history scholarship, we feature a series of US Constitution postcards created by students of Daniel Levinson-Wilk and Amy Werbel at the Fashion Institute of Technology. These unexpected forms of US cultural and intellectual history depict particular Amendments, using graphic design to propose arguments and perspectives on the past—and perhaps suggesting fresh ways we can confront political and Constitutional crises in the present. We also have a US intellectual history syllabus, “A Ruthless Critique of the American History Survey,” from Andrew Hartman.
Looking ahead, Volume 03 is already starting to appear on the horizon. We have a roundtable of responses, by way of intellectual and legal history, to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision; a roundtable on the work of John A. Kouwenhoven; an inquiry into how E.L. Carr’s classic book on historical research can help us test out more recent arguments; an essay on what it means to toggle between belle-lettristic and scholarly forms of historical writing about ideas and culture; and an exploration of how a thousand words can tell us something about a picture. That and more ahead.
Remember, if you are interested in writing for The Carryall, organizing a roundtable, or if you have another idea, feel free to contact us. Letters to the Editor are also welcome.
For now, we invite you to join us for Volume 02.
Slowly, but steadily, forward,
Michael J. Kramer, Editor