The founding Fathers based the American system on principles of equality and freedom, but often people who made America their home faced inequality, injustice, and legal discrimination. The Free and the Unfree documents what happened when Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants, religious minorities, and women tested America's humanitarian and democratic principles. It surveys the social, cultural, political, and economic developments that broadened America's definition of freedom-from the earliest contacts with Native Americans and the Revolutionary War through the Civil Rights movement and the sexual revolution. The Free and the Unfree presents a concise, thorough, and up-to-date examination of the spirit and limits of freedom, providing readers with a little-known perspective on American history.

Why do modern people assume that there will be perpetual economic growth? Because, David W. Noble tells us in this provocative study of cultural criticism, such a utopian conviction is the necessary foundation for bourgeois culture. One can imagine the existence of modern middle classes only as long as the capitalist marketplace is expanding. For Noble, the related-and relevant-question is, how can the middle classes believe that a finite earth is an environment in which infinite growth is possible? The answer, which Noble so painstakingly charts, is nothing less than a genealogy of the uses and abuses of knowledge that lie at the heart of so many of our political problems today. As far back as Plato and as recently as Alan Greenspan, Noble finds proponents of the idea of a world of independent, rational individuals living in timeless simplicity, escaping from an old world of interdependence and generations. Such notions, although in sync with Newtonian science, have come up against the subsequent conclusions of geology, biology, and the physics of Einstein. In a survey of the responses to this quandary of historians, economists, literary critics, and ecologists, Noble reveals how this confrontation, and its implications for a single global marketplace, has forced certain academic disciplines into unnatural-and untenable-positions. David Noble's work exposes the cost-not academic at all-of the segregation of the physical sciences from the humanities and social sciences, even as it demonstrates the required movement of the humanities toward the ecological vision of a single, interconnected world.

"Historians Against History " was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Professor Noble examines the basic philosophy and writing of six American historians, George Bancroft, Frederick Jackson, Charles A. Beard, Carl Becker, Vernon Louis Parrington, and Daniel J. Boorstin, and finds in them a common tradition which he calls anti-historical. He argues that this viewpoint is founded in the frontier interpretation of American history, that American historians have served as the chief political theorists and theologians of this country since 1830, and that their writings can be interpreted as Jeremiads designed to preserve a national covenant with nature.

The Paradox of Progressive Thought was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This book describes and analyzes an important aspect of American intellectual history, the climate of opinion in which nine leaders of progressive thought in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were important creators and spokesmen. By closely examining the central ideas of these men, Professor Noble presents an illuminating view of a significant phase of the liberal tradition in America. At the same time, he questions many of the generally accepted views about the philosophical basis of traditional liberalism and demonstrates the paradox of progressive thought. The social philosophers whose writings and teachings he scrutinizes are Herbert Croly, long-time editor of the New Republic; James Mark Baldwin, psychologist and philosopher; Charles H. Cooley, author of Social Organization; F. H. Johnson, theologian whose name was linked with Darwinism; Henry Demarest Lloyd, reformer and newspaperman who attacked the evils of monopoly in his book Wealth and Commonwealth; Richard T. Ely, economist and early advocate of Christian socialism; Simon N. Patten, whose work The Premises of Political Economy lifted him to fame; Thorstein Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class is a household word today; and Walter Rauschenbusch, the Baptist clergyman who wrote Christianity and the Social Crisis and Christianity and the Social Order. In addition, there is extensive consideration of the thought and influence of Carl L. Becker, the noted historian and analyst of thought and philosophy in action.

In the 1940s, American thought experienced a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Before then, national ideology was shaped by American exceptionalism and bourgeois nationalism: elites saw themselves as the children of a homogeneous nation standing outside the history and culture of the Old World. This view repressed the cultures of those who did not fit the elite vision: people of color, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. David W. Noble, a preeminent figure in American studies, inherited this ideology. However, like many who entered the field in the 1940s, he rejected the ideals of his intellectual predecessors and sought a new, multicultural, post-national scholarship. Throughout his career, Noble has examined this rupture in American intellectual life. In Death of a Nation, he presents the culmination of decades of thought in a sweeping treatise on the shaping of contemporary American studies and an eloquent summation of his distinguished career.

Exploring the roots of American exceptionalism, Noble demonstrates that it was a doomed ideology. Capitalists who believed in a bounded nationalism also depended on a boundless, international marketplace. This contradiction was inherently unstable, and the belief in a unified national landscape exploded in World War II. The rupture provided an opening for alternative narratives as class, ethnicity, race, and region were reclaimed as part of the nation's history. Noble traces the effects of this shift among scholars and artists, and shows how even today they struggle to imagine an alternative postnational narrative and seek the meaning of local and national cultures in an increasingly transnational world. While Noble illustrates the challenges thatthe paradigm shift created, he also suggests solutions that will help scholars avoid romanticized and reductive approaches toward the study of American culture in the future.