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Changes to the landscape of higher education in the United States
over the past decades have urged scholars grappling with issues of
privilege, inequality, and social immobility to think differently
about how we learn and deliberate. Thinking Together is a
multidisciplinary conversation about how people approached similar
questions of learning and difference in the nineteenth century. In
the open air, in homes, in public halls, and even in prisons,
people pondered recurring issues: justice, equality, careers,
entertainment, war and peace, life and death, heaven and hell, the
role of education, and the nature of humanity itself. Paying
special attention to the dynamics of race and gender in
intellectual settings, the contributors to this volume consider how
myriad groups and individuals—many of whom lived on the margins
of society and had limited access to formal education—developed
and deployed knowledge useful for public participation and public
advocacy around these concerns. Essays examine examples such as the
women and men who engaged lecture culture during the Civil War;
Irish immigrants who gathered to assess their relationship to the
politics and society of the New World; African American women and
men who used music and theater to challenge the white gaze; and
settler-colonists in Liberia who created forums for envisioning a
new existence in Africa and their relationship to a U.S. homeland.
Taken together, this interdisciplinary exploration shows how
learning functioned not only as an instrument for public action but
also as a way to forge meaningful ties with others and to affirm
the value of an intellectual life. By highlighting people, places,
and purposes that diversified public discourse, Thinking Together
offers scholars across the humanities new insights and perspectives
on how difference enhances the human project of thinking together.
Changes to the landscape of higher education in the United States
over the past decades have urged scholars grappling with issues of
privilege, inequality, and social immobility to think differently
about how we learn and deliberate. Thinking Together is a
multidisciplinary conversation about how people approached similar
questions of learning and difference in the nineteenth century. In
the open air, in homes, in public halls, and even in prisons,
people pondered recurring issues: justice, equality, careers,
entertainment, war and peace, life and death, heaven and hell, the
role of education, and the nature of humanity itself. Paying
special attention to the dynamics of race and gender in
intellectual settings, the contributors to this volume consider how
myriad groups and individuals-many of whom lived on the margins of
society and had limited access to formal education-developed and
deployed knowledge useful for public participation and public
advocacy around these concerns. Essays examine examples such as the
women and men who engaged lecture culture during the Civil War;
Irish immigrants who gathered to assess their relationship to the
politics and society of the New World; African American women and
men who used music and theater to challenge the white gaze; and
settler-colonists in Liberia who created forums for envisioning a
new existence in Africa and their relationship to a U.S. homeland.
Taken together, this interdisciplinary exploration shows how
learning functioned not only as an instrument for public action but
also as a way to forge meaningful ties with others and to affirm
the value of an intellectual life. By highlighting people, places,
and purposes that diversified public discourse, Thinking Together
offers scholars across the humanities new insights and perspectives
on how difference enhances the human project of thinking together.
At the turn of the twentieth century, no other public intellectual
was as celebrated in America as the influential philosopher and
psychologist William James. Sought after around the country, James
developed his ideas in lecture halls and via essays and books
intended for general audiences. Reaching out to and connecting with
these audiences was crucial to James--so crucial that in 1903 he
identified "popular statement," or speaking and writing in a way
that animated the thought of popular audiences, as the "highest
form of art." Paul Stob's thought-provoking history traces James's
art of popular statement through pivotal lectures, essays, and
books, including his 1878 lectures in Baltimore and Boston, "Talks
to Teachers on Psychology," "The Varieties of Religious
Experience," and "Pragmatism." The book explores James's unique
approach to public address, which involved crafting lectures in
science, religion, and philosophy around ordinary people and their
experiences. With democratic bravado, James confronted those who
had accumulated power through various systems of academic and
professional authority, and argued that intellectual power should
be returned to the people. Stob argues that James gave those he
addressed a central role in the pursuit of knowledge and fostered
in them a new intellectual curiosity unlike few scholars before or
since.
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