FORUM: THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY INTRODUCTION

The following essays present six distinct but broadly compatible narratives of scholarship in United States intellectual history over the past half-century: postwar dominance, a season of despair, and then the field's rise, transformation, and expansion. The essays are a feast of erudition; any reader will come away from them with a list of "must-read" books. But there is much more here. These are rigorous and sophisticated explorations-at once historical and prescriptive-of a flourishing field. The writers span different generations, with authors representative of older, middling, and younger scholars. These appraisals are various yet they are unambiguously within the mainstream, tracking the current understandings of the somewhat fuzzy boundaries of the field. While additional writers might have further enriched the coverage, these writers together offer a fair representation of current practice in the field. © 2012 Cambridge University Press.