UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies
UCD, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland | Director: Professor Liam Kennedy
Prof. John L. Brooke
(Ohio State University)
"The Public Sphere and American Historical Writing: A Modest Proposal."
John L. Brooke, Humanities Distinguished Professor of American History at the Ohio State University spoke informally on the 14th of October 2004 under the rubric, "The Public Sphere and American Historical Writing: A Modest Proposal." In his presentation Prof Brooke discussed the development of Jurgen Habermas's concept of the "public sphere" as an important but contested approach to research and writing in American history. Prof Brooke suggested some ways in which a revised understanding of the public sphere, encompassed by a framework of consent and civil society, provides a bridge between older political histories and new cultural histories.
A full development of these ideas has since been published in "Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic," in Jeffery L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 207-250.
Some of the suggestions and critiques developed by the participants at the Clinton Institute’s Seminar have shaped his discussion in "On the Edges of the Public Sphere," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 62 (2005), 93-98.
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