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9780367633110

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It will not surprise anyone acquainted with Dan Wickberg that he has written a magisterial history of the rise of modern ways of thinking in the United States. The book tracks Americans’ quest, since the mid-nineteenth century, for frameworks to make sense of a newly unsettled and fluid world. But at its core are the deep contradictions marking modernity: the fresh possibilities inherent in indeterminacy on the one hand, and the conceiving of new modes of coercion and unfreedom on the other. Deftly noting intellectual conflicts and cross-currents yet still able to identify the “lenses, categories, and sensibilities” that have remade modern thought, the book sparkles. From his very first chapter specifying what was novel and generative (and what was not) about Darwin’s Origin of Species, to his last—on the dissolving border between the realms of culture and politics in the late twentieth century, unleashing the “culture wars” and much else—Wickberg offers a lucid, compelling, and even gripping retelling of modern American intellectual history. Sarah E. Igo, Vanderbilt University, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America

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Daniel Wickberg has taught intellectual history at the University of Texas at Dallas for over 25 years. His primary areas of research are the history of American social thought and historiography. He is the author of The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (1998).

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