Early Thoughts On Jacoby’s The Age Of American Unreason
I haven’t read Susan Jacoby‘s The Age of American Unreason—but I want to. With that, I’m not going to engage here in one of those pointless how-to-talk-about-a-book-you-haven’t-read pieces. But I want...
View ArticleThe Age of American Unreason [6]
Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason gave me hope that the definitive statement for which I had long been waiting had finally arrived. Despite the current academic celebration of popular culture...
View Articlenew Susan Jacoby book [3]
I see that Susan Jacoby’s forthcoming book bears the modest title of Alger Hiss and the Battle for History. No doubt she’ll definitively put that controversy to bed the same way she dispatched American...
View ArticleTheorizing The Culture Wars: Jacques Barzun, Politics, And Fostering...
by Tim Lacy Jacques Barzun predicted the Culture Wars. Well, maybe not. He was both a historian and a product of his times, not a prophet. But there is little doubt that the Culture Wars of his early...
View ArticleThe Boob Tube, Books, and Learning: A Philosophy of Television [5]
Here’s yet another piece from the book that didn’t make the final round of content cuts. In this Mortimer Adler articulated an embryonic philosophy of television in relation to books, great books, and...
View ArticleBeyond the Golden Age: Rethinking the History of the Anti-Vaccination...
[Note: This following was presented on April 18, 2015 at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in St. Louis. As a note of appreciation to S-USIH for sponsoring my panel, I am...
View ArticleBeyond Scientific Ignorance: Seeking the Roots of Democratized Anti-Knowledge...
A new article on Stanford’s prominent historian of science, Robert N. Proctor, made the rounds last week. The BBC’s Georgina Kenyon profiled him in a January 6 piece for his excellent work on...
View ArticleWarp Speed: The Media and Democratized Ignorance [2]
In my last post on “democratized anti-knowledge,” I began with a discussion a BBC article that featured the work of Robert Proctor. In the process I covered Naomi Oreskes’ and Erik Conway’s Merchants...
View ArticleFreethought, Ingersoll, and U.S. Intellectual History
Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), x + 246 pages. Review by Paul V. Murphy One of the reasons for the popularity of...
View Article