Author Description

Gathering some of the most significant documents in American intellectual history, this unique anthology makes readily available substantial selections from the writings of prominent American thinkers, ranging chronologically from the early seventeenth century to the present. Volume One (to 1865) includes writings of John Winthrop, Samuel Willard, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Charles Grandison Finney, John Humphrey Noyes, William Leggett, George Bancroft, Catharine Beecher, Henry C. Carey, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. Volume Two includes Charles Peirce, William Dean Howells, William Graham Sumner, Lester Frank Ward, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W.E.B. Dubois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Josiah Royce, William James, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Randolph Bourne, Margaret Mead, Edmund Wilson, Rudolph Carnap, Reinhold Niebuhr, B.F. Skinner, Daniel Bell, C. Wright Mills, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lionel Trilling, Thomas Kuhn, and Richard Rorty. Designed for easy use by a wide range of readers, The American Intellectual Tradition provides ample explanatory material on the documents and points the way to recent scholarly work in the field. It is not only invaluable as a text for intellectual history courses, but also as a supplementary text in American studies, American literature, and American history surveys.