ABSTRACT
The academic practice of intellectual history is itself a historical phenomenon. Questions and topics take on interest for scholars because they connect with contemporary concerns and perspectives. Interpretation is enmeshed in evolving cultural and ideological dispositions, “ways of seeing” that generate discrete patterns of discourse, which in turn yield distinct questions and concerns, distinct focal points for investigating events, ideas, and relations in the past. Although thematic and focal shifts in intellectual-historical interpretation do not track ideological currents typically in intentional or self-conscious ways, scholarly discourse is at least as likely to follow broader ideological conventions and trends as to shape them. The questions that scholars ask, and where and how they seek answers to them, are refracted more or less obliquely through the wakes those currents leave as common sense—the baseline of premises and propositions whose validity is assumed without reflection, as self-evident. This is true not only of historical scholarship but also of intellectual life in general, and the intellectual history of black Americans as a field of study is not exceptional in this regard. Neither are this volume and its authors.
