American Intellectual History

Author: Wayne Louis PARRY
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-12-01
Features: American Thought: A Key to Understanding, which fundamentally helps unravel the mystery; PARRY provides us with a true thread in exploring the course of American thought. PARRY's writing is research-based, starting from the original thought in American literature, integrating politics and economics, and connecting humanities and society. Such research, in terms of its subject, necessarily involves a broad intellectual background. "Various European thought systems, introduced to America generation after generation and interacting with the local atmosphere and regional development, have formed a thought system defined as distinctly American." This Chinese translation, a massive work of over 1,100 pages and 1.1 million words, is divided into three volumes. Volume I covers 1620–1800: The Colonial Spirit; Volume II covers 1800–1860: The Romantic Revolution in America; Volume III covers 1860–1920: The Dawn of Critical Realism. In Volume I, the author carefully examines the legacy left by 17th and 18th-century Europe for the colonies, with the crucial point being the transplantation of liberalism from the old world to America. Some ideals and institutions from the old world that entered America ultimately succumbed to the pressures of the new environment, overthrowing the principles of monarchy and aristocracy and establishing the principles of republicanism. In the second volume, the author studies the "new things" of the "New World," including two wars—The War of 1812 accelerated the development of 19th-century ideals, while the Civil War completely eradicated the barbaric phenomena of the "innocent age." The author believes that in the early days of the founding of the United States, the humanitarian philosophy of the French Enlightenment and the liberal philosophy of Britain were in a struggle for dominance in America. In the third volume, America is in a state of change, starting from the free vision of the Gilded Age. "The pulse of the entrepreneurial spirit, the pragmatic cultural strategy, the political ideas behind economic development, and the fierce ideological struggles—all of these forged a national consciousness and wove an illusory and elusive American Dream."