The Journal of the History of Ideas Blog

Tag 20th Century

Sadie P. Delaney: Our Lady of Bibliotherapy

by contributing editor Brooke Palmieri The debate over whether reading is good or bad for your health is as old as the habit itself. In The Anatomy of Melancholy reading and scholarship sometimes cause, sometimes cure, Robert Burton’s depression; the… Continue Reading →

Reestablishing Philosophy in a Destroyed Country: Karl Löwith’s Return to Germany

by guest contributor Mike Rottmann Almost one year after the end of war, on July 20, 1946, a leading executive of the Department of Education in the State of Baden sent a letter to the President of Heidelberg University: With… Continue Reading →

Aldo Leopold and the History of Environmental Ideas

By guest contributor Daniel Rinn There seems to be a dualism at work in the way intellectual historians think about the history of environmental thought. The history of environmental ethics is presented as a continuous conflict between two competing systems,… Continue Reading →

Green Internationalism and the European Countryside

by contributing editor Carolyn Taratko The image of the farmer tilling his field is an enduring one; it evokes meaningful labor, ties to the natural world, and self-sufficiency. However, such images were not always interpreted this way. When Jean-François Millet’s… Continue Reading →

Hippie Bibliography

by contributing editor Erin McGuirl The story of the Whole Earth Catalog begins with an annotation. During the flight home from his father’s funeral in March of 1968, Stewart Brand (b. 1938) covered the endpapers of the economist and writer… Continue Reading →

Wilhelm Reich: A Disappointed Utopian

by guest contributor Zachary Levine What should we do when brilliant thinkers push their ideas in strange directions? Should we try to interpret their later work in the context of their earlier work, or vice versa? Should we reject their… Continue Reading →

Asking the Social Question

by guest contributor Steven McClellan What’s in a name? When I began thinking about writing a dissertation on the history of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), I assumed that the largest problem would be related to the… Continue Reading →

Why Auden Left: “September 1, 1939” and British Cultural Life

by guest contributor Spencer Lenfield To make sense of the intellectual climate of Britain on the eve of the Second World War, one could do worse than to turn to the case of W.H. Auden. It would be less accurate… Continue Reading →

The Walnut Rubbing Chinese Gentleman: Ernst Cordes’ Travelogue to Beijing, 1937

by guest contributor I-Yi Hsieh Boarding on the Siberia train, in the mid-1930s, the German Sinologist Ernst Cordes traveled across the Manchurian-Russia border to the cities of Harbin, then Manchukuo’s “New Capital” (formerly Changchun), and Mukden (Shenyang). Cordes went south… Continue Reading →

Visual Affinities, Living History

by contributing editor Brooke Palmieri There are all kinds of ways in which a book’s form can intensify its content, draw its words into relationships, inscribe its title within the family trees of works written by other people in other… Continue Reading →

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