My Back Pages
A catalog of some older writing
Between 2014 and 2021, I blogged at the U.S. Intellectual History Blog, and from time to time, I get a Google Scholar alert that one or another of my posts has been cited. I think some of what I wrote might interest readers of this Substack, so here’s a selected catalogue, grouped by theme and lightly annotated:
The “new” history of capitalism: a long series of posts I did to try to explain the origins and underlying ideas animating the subfield.
Asking New Questions of the New History of Capitalism (August 20, 2018)
When Did the History of Capitalism Become New? Periodizing the Field (August 27, 2018)
Two Paths for the History of Capitalism: Commodification and Proletarianization (September 3, 2018)
From Proletarianization to Commodification: The New Plot of the History of Capitalism (September 24, 2018)
Boundlessness, Commodification, and Nature’s Metropolis (October 1, 2018)
Newsworthiness, Social Construction, and the History of Capitalism (November 19, 2018)
Commodity Histories, Complicity, and the New History of Capitalism (December 3, 2018)
The New History of Capitalism and What It Owes to Poststructuralism (December 24, 2018)
Resounding Clashes: Gender and the New History of Capitalism (February 13, 2019)
Growth and Price: Douglass North vs. the New History of Capitalism (March 4, 2019)
Cultural History as the Old History of Capitalism? (May 7, 2019)
The Little Lower Layer: From Cultural History to the History of Capitalism (May 13, 2019)
Forking Paths: The New History of Capitalism and Economic History (August 26, 2019)
Some Thoughts on What Separates Working-Class History from the New History of Capitalism (September 16, 2019)
On Carl Becker
Who Reads Carl Becker? (March 15, 2014)
Carl Becker and Disillusionment (March 22, 2014)
Climates of Opinion and Magic Words: Carl Becker (March 30, 2015)
Becker and Style (April 6, 2015)
Mad about the Goy: Gentile Patronage and the Academy (May 2, 2016)
On Thomas Carlyle
From Thomas Carlyle to Chris Kyle and Gordon Wood: On Heroes, the Post-Heroic, and Hero-Worship (February 20, 2015)
The Premature Death of Thomas Carlyle? (March 2, 2015)
Thomas Carlyle, Walt Whitman, and the Foes of Democracy (March 9, 2015)
Review-ish takes on individual books
Euphoria (May 4, 2015)
An appreciation of Lily King’s novel
“We Have Talked Our Extinction to Death”: Mark Greif’s Age of the Crisis of Man (May 18, 2015)
Fathers and Uncles: Baldwin and Coates (July 27, 2015)
A response to the many comparisons floating around at the time between The Fire Next Time and Between the World and Me
Re-Surveying the Via Media (October 6, 2015)
On James Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory
Error or Amnesia: Albert Hirschman’s Passions and the Interests (January 26, 2016)
Compression and Myth: Slotkin and the Frontier (April 25, 2016)
On Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992)
Cultural Capital in the Twenty-First Century (September 26, 2016)
A very critical response to Fred Siegel’s The Revolt against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class
From Palin to Trump: On the Second Edition of The Reactionary Mind (November 20, 2017)
On Finding Women and Redefining Power: Part of the Salon on Mary Beard (1/22/2018)
On Mary Beard’s Women and Power
The Long Happy Lives of Two Classics by Eric Foner and Daniel Walker Howe (February 12, 2018)
On The Political Culture of the American Whigs and Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War
The Moral Reader and the Moral Life (December 17, 2018)
A critical engagement with Timothy Aubry’s Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures
Just Asking Questions: On Holly Case’s Age of Questions (December 31, 2018)
Dehumanization and Extirpation: Hatred and Sacrifice in History (January 21, 2019)
An attempt to make Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny available to intellectual historians
Educated and an Intellectual History of Brain Trauma (April 9, 2019)
A reflection on one aspect of Tara Westover’s Educated: A Memoir
Arrogance and Empire: What Can US Intellectual History Learn from US and the World? (May 20, 2019)
An attempt to mediate the debate between Daniel Immerwahr and Paul Kramer over Immerwahr’s (very good) How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
Sarah Smarsh’s Theory of Labor (June 3, 2019)
An appreciation of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
Adjusting to the Program Era: Gender and Abundance (July 16, 2019)
A reflection on how men and women have responded to the “surfeit of literary excellence” that Mark McGurl identified as characteristic of “the Program Era”
The Reformism of Fear (August 12, 2019)
A critical response to Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
The Didion Way of Death (October 28, 2019)
An irritated response to The Year of Magical Thinking and to Didion more generally
Gloaters and Brooders: Profiles in Complexity (April 23, 2021)
A critical response to Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
There’s a lot more in the archive, which you can check out in full here.