Leslie Butler

FROM THE HISTORY OF IDEAS TO IDEAS IN HISTORY

The story of American intellectual historys decline, fall, and phoenix-like rebirth in recent decades has become trite with the retelling: knocked from its position of prominence by the new social history and plunged into the chastened soul-searching of the famed Wingspread Conference of 1977, only to find itself rescued in part by the linguistic and cultural “turns” that swept the entire discipline of American history in the 1980s and 1990s. Like many a narrative, this one undoubtedly imposes too clear a pattern of meaning on a messier reality, but also like many a narrative, it has powerfully shaped the professional identities of American intellectual historians by giving them a sense of where they have been and how they arrived at their current place. That current place is a hospitable one, in many ways, for in the last couple of decades American historians seem to have grown increasingly receptive to the notion that ideas have mattered in history.

Lincoln as the Great Educator: Opinion and Educative Liberalism in the Civil War Era

In Edinburgh, Scotland in 1893, a monument honoring Scotsmen who fought for the Union Army was unveiled in the Old Calton Cemetery. At the center of this transatlantic celebration were two bronze figures situated atop a plinth of red granite: on one level, a former slave extends a hand upward toward a large and imposing Abraham Lincoln, who stands looming far above. The familiar pairing of a kneeling slave and a standing president resembled Thomas Ball’s Freedman Memorial in Washington, DC, which had earlier given iconographic representation to the understanding of Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator.” Much else about this monument and its unveiling had the ring of the familiarity, from the young American woman depicting Columbia dressed in a flowing white gown to the toasts to “Saxon freedom” during this decade of Anglo-American rapprochement.1

HISTORICIZING AMERICAN TRAVEL, AT HOME AND ABROAD

In the winter of 1859, the Boston poet Julia Ward Howe sailed for Cuba; and in the winter of 1860, Ticknor and Fields published an account of her travel. A Trip to Cuba appeared only months after the same firm had published Richard Henry Danas story of his “vacation voyage,” To Cuba and Back . These two narratives responded to a burgeoning American interest in the Caribbean island that promised recuperation to American invalids and adventure for military “filibusters.” Howes narrative demonstrated a self-conscious familiarity with antebellum travel writing more broadly, however, as she playfully resisted yet ultimately upheld various conventions of a genre that had become a staple of the American literary marketplace. “I do not know why all celebrated people who write books of travel begin by describing their days of seasickness,” she noted, before discussing her own shipboard illness. She followed similar cues as she blended elements of autobiography, the social sketch, nature writing, and political and social commentary. Across 250 “sprightly” pages, readers were offered a familiar melange of humorous portraits, detailed descriptions of “foreign” institutions, and extensive commentary on local customs and social mores.