What Does a Virtual Conference Look Like?

Scholars have been grousing about the expense of annual meetings for years. The pandemic is our opportunity to imagine change

----------- Why do we conference? Scholarship, dialogue, and community are all good answers to that question. But as the Covid-19 pandemic remapped our lives and shuttered American institutions last spring, the Society of United States Intellectual History (S-USIH) took stock of our annual meeting plans. Suddenly, answering that question became urgent. We had set ...
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What Does a Virtual Conference Look Like?

The Way We Shop Now

How American fiction has helped decode the history of capitalism

Consider the salesgirl. This holiday season, as we navigate the nation’s retail theatre in stores and online, let’s think about the ideas and ideologies of the diverse Americans at work behind the counter. Hero or villain, peddler or pauper, capitalist superhero or covert anarchist: the figure of the salesman has ...
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The Way We Shop Now

The Christian and the Cosmos

The Puritan’s Grand Tour

Horace Bushnell needed a vacation. On the first day of July 1845, the Hartford, Conn., clergyman boarded the British packet-ship Victoria and set off for a salaried year in Europe. Weary from preaching trips to New York City, Washington, D.C., North Carolina, and Ohio, along with the publication of a prolific number of tracts, ...
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The Christian and the Cosmos

A Woman’s Work

A Library of One’s Own

Read the news with a suffragist of 1913. Women’s rights advocates scanning the society page of the Atlanta Constitution on the morning of 4 June had a bevy of personas to peruse. There was the “Woman Shopper” gliding through a downy Eden of department stores: “Your presence, your influence and the wholesome atmosphere that ...
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