This thesis examines the nature–origin, character, and temporal change–of the difference that educated and mostly male white southerners had about history at the level of historiography and other texts among themselves and in relation to “modern history” mostly in the states of Virginia and South Carolina in the first four decades of the 19th century. The study compares and contrasts such postulate with two other areas of cultural discussion that included, but was not limited to, history. The first is the locality of New England, with some support from the Mid–Atlantic States New York and Pennsylvania. By the 1790s, these areas dominated the national intellectual landscape of U.S. culture. The individuals resided, grew up, educated or published in these states. The second is the change about culture that was initiated in Europe roughly after the 1750s the thesis refers to as “modern history”. It transformed history into a major area of interest and cultural component. History attained a status it had previously lacked within Western modernity. The practical method is mainly a scanning of digitalized online contemporary printed sources–mostly leading books about history, leading contemporary journals, letter collections, and historical novels mostly produced in the U.S.–for word “history” and a variant “histor” that yields for example “historical” and “histories”. In order to reveal the southern difference, the findings have then been subjected to the study’s theoretical and methodological framework. Instead of being a scientific undertaking, linguistically neutral, or grounded in material reality as usually treated in the U.S., written history overlaps with other text production and communication such as literary writing, poetics, and cultural discourse. The philosophy of modernity and scientific truth history became associated with in its modern guise can be read as a metaphysical problem and crisis of especial severity in the southern areas. There, modern history entailed an experiential and communicative renovation that extended to individuals and their relationship to society. Through partly deductive, partly poetic readings, the study charts the course of this change that spans from syntax to discourse, philosophy, semiotics and poetics. Some key individuals, many rather obscure today, are identified. The concerns help reveal the tension of modern association of reality with history that has obscured and forgotten competing claims about and experiences of this relationship. The New England–led “bloc” departed from European skepticism at first still present in modern history as well. Virginia and South Carolina seldom rejected the European critical tradition. Modern history became disseminated more only in the 1840s, comparatively more in South Carolina. Previously, it was rare to see history as romantic, evangelical or scientific like in New England. Especially until the late–1830s, history predating modern history was combined with skeptical and ironic views about the history– reality relationship. Unlike often portrayed, these learned white southerners were rarely sentimentalists. Equally rare was to conflate reality and science with history for nationalist ends and mold useful (white, male) citizens. Forgotten perspectives and agencies can be re–examined by including more recent theories about history and language.

Southern historiography in modern history: figural and philosophical aspects of historical discourse in Virginia and South Carolina, 1800-1844

The first study of its kind, The Impact of Idealism assesses the impact of classical German philosophy on science, religion and culture. This fourth volume explores German Idealism's impact on theology and religious ideas in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With contributions from leading scholars, this collection not only demonstrates the vast range of Idealism's theological influence across different centuries, countries, continents, traditions and religions, but also, in doing so, provides fresh insight into the original ideas and themes with which Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and others were concerned. As well as tracing out the Idealist influence in the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theologians, philosophers of religion, and theological traditions, from Schleiermacher, to Karl Barth, to Radical Orthodoxy, the essays in this collection bring each debate up to date with a strong focus on Idealism's contemporary relevance.

The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought

Notable among the by-products of the late nineteenth-century controversies over the atomic theory of matter was the first full-scale contribution to the philosophy of science written in America,. John Bernard Stallo’s The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics. The work of a lawyer and jurist largely self-trained in philosophy, its publication in 1881 provoked considerable (and mostly hostile) reaction1, for Stallo attacked atomism and mechanism at a time when scientists were still divided into vociferously opposing camps over the question of whether or not the ultimate structure of matter was atomic - indeed, were in sharp disagreement over even the utility of the hypothetical concept ’atom’ in physics and chemistry.2

The erkenntnistheoretiker's dilemma: j. b. stallo's attack on atomism in his concepts and theories of modern physics (1881)

The career of American Hegelianism, as might be expected, reveals almost as much about the distinctive features of the native cultural and intellectual tradition as it does of the theoretical contribution of Hegel to professional philosophy in the English-speaking world during the last century and a half. In this brief essay I have divided the story of American Hegelianism into four periods, on the understanding that these are thematically suggestive rather than chronologically exact. Each marks a changed estimate of Hegel's importance within the United States, and each includes some discussion of an influential or ‘modal’ figure with loyalties to Hegel or to derivative absolute idealist doctrine. The intention is to provide an historical ‘map’ with bibliographical and biographical landmarks, which may prove to be of use or interest to students of Hegelianism at other times and in other places. For several reasons, independent of his own estimate of America as ‘the land of the future’, the United States should have proved receptive to Hegel's ideas. American philosophy, in a remarkably continuous tradition from dissent within Puritanism to contemporary logicians, has consistently returned to the tenets of idealism and voluntarism; stressing the. essential spirituality of the material and social world and the decisive role of the will in the forming of that world. Hegel and later absolute idealists assisted significantly in maintaining these preoccupations, but theirs was not the most persuasive voice. In several senses American idealism, as measured by the origins and development of the most important indigenous doctrine – the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce and his successors – has remained more consistently Kantian than Hegelian, more epistemological than metaphysical, more concerned with the individual human conscience than the grand formal and historical design.

Hegelianism in the United States

The history of the Hegelians of Saint Louis, Missouri, is as much the story of a book as it is of persons and places.1 The book is a translation into English of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) Larger Logic.2

Loyd David Easton

Papers

Hegel's first American followers: The Ohio Hegelians: John B. Stallo, Peter Kaufmann, Moncure Conway, and August Willich, with key writings