A forum for historians of political thought, philosophy, religion, literature, the social and natural sciences, music, architecture, and the visual arts.

Joined August 2018
23 Photos and videos
Modern Intellectual History is now on Bluesky Social! You can also follow us there: @mihjournal.bsky.social
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📣 Announcing The 2026 MIH Lecture! We’re thrilled to welcome Prof. Marlene L. Daut (Yale) for her talk: “The King of Haiti and Black Statecraft in the Nineteenth Century.” 📅 March 19, 2026 ⏰ 2:15–3:45 PM CST 📍 Black Cultural Center Auditorium, Vanderbilt University
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Modern Intellectual History @mihjournal.bsky.socia retweeted
Now on FirstView: Du Bois’s Eugenic Democracy? Inder S. Marwah examines how Darwinism, eugenics, and fin de siècle race sciences shaped W. E. B. Du Bois’s early political ideas on race and racial uplift bit.ly/47JWJOH
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Modern Intellectual History @mihjournal.bsky.socia retweeted
Now on FirstView: William Godwin as a democrat? Minchul Kim @mkim1789 analyzes Godwin’s ideas of democracy and the time-regime of European political thought in the Age of Revolutions bit.ly/3L7Kqmn
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Modern Intellectual History @mihjournal.bsky.socia retweeted
Now on FirstView: The “Woman’s Seed”? Ariane Viktoria Fichtl @threadofariane analyzes the discourse on “mental metempsychosis” that challenged the concept of the heritability of slavery and was at the heart of immediate abolitionism in Britain bit.ly/3JI5XBC

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Modern Intellectual History @mihjournal.bsky.socia retweeted
Now on FirstView: Camilla Boisen reflects on the stories we tell ourselves about peace and genocide in her review essay of A. Dirk Moses’ @dirkmoses The Problems of Genocide and Lauren Benton’s They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence bit.ly/4pORCCp

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Modern Intellectual History @mihjournal.bsky.socia retweeted
Now on FirstView: More Marx, Less Marxism? Ulrich Plass reviews the new Princeton edition of Marx’s Capital (Vol. 1) recently translated by Paul Reitte bit.ly/467NcQg

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Now on FirstView: Abolition on the eve of revolution? Jennifer Pitts and Michael F. Suarez, S.J., examine Condorcet’s French translation of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s influential antislavery treatise and analyze its reception in France bit.ly/4rkICX0

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Now on FirstView: Against the Caesarist crowd? Peter Giraudo analyzes Georges Sorel’s early democratic socialism during the Dreyfus affair and his ideas on workers’ dissociation from Parisian crowds as a necessary condition for socialist progress bit.ly/4k4m4qL

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Now on FirstView: Civil society divided against itself? Pamela C. Nogales analyzes labor reformers’ fights for shorter hours in antebellum U.S. and the transatlantic debates over a global “social republic” bit.ly/3ZHlK7X
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Now on FirstView: What happened to New England theology? Sam Gee analyzes the contemporary decline of scholarship on New England Theology and proposes a way forward for its study by going beyond evangelical readings of the sources bit.ly/4a1jI7s
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Now on FirstView: Nayeli L. Riano reflects on the questions and methods of intellectual history in her review essay of Javier Fernández-Sebastián’s Key Metaphors for History and Elías Palti’s Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change bit.ly/4q1wSas
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Now on FirstView: Ferenc Laczo discusses the historical narratives of “the West” and “Europe” in his review essay of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea and Anthony Pagden’s The Pursuit of Europe: A History bit.ly/4ph9xSq

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Now on FirstView: Timothy Scott Johnson analyzes the ties between empire, decolonization, and sociology in France in his review essay of George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought and Amín Pérez’s Bourdieu and Sayad against Empire bit.ly/4hTYUm5
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Now on FirstView: Conservative Arab thought after Islam? Ahmed Dailami reconstructs the intellectual history of the Arab right through the work of philosopher Mohammed Jaber al-Ansari in the late 20th century bit.ly/3JROcQp
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From MIH Archives: Where is British America in the Republic of Letters? Caroline Winterer explores the prospects and limits of digitally mapping the republic of letters and reframing our textual archive in spatial dimensions bit.ly/4cHYMSl

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Now on FirstView: Governing the Miracle? @JuliaNordblad discusses the consequences of planetary perspective for political thought in her review essay of Blake and Gilman’s Children of a Modest Star and Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts bit.ly/3Wj57Ot
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