The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History

Every book on this subject is bound to disappoint. It is a problem of boundaries: what are the boundaries of “cultural and intellectual history”? Does it have any? Culture as a subject is illimitable since any settled pattern of human activity is a form of culture. In just the same way, an effort of “intellect” is involved in every purposeful work of man. But, having proved that the subject cannot be defined, let us be practical about this. Oxford University Press has had to set arbitrary limits to this area of study in order to create a workable text. These...