Books in the American Thought and Culture series

The World Turned Inside Out explores American thought and culture in the formative moment of the late twentieth century in the aftermath of the fabled Sixties. The overall argument here is that the tendencies and sensibilities we associate with that earlier moment of upheaval decisively shaped intellectual agendas and cultural practices in the 1980s and 90s.

The book explores the cultural and intellectual worlds of the hustling promoters, battling historians, Catholic missionaries, Native American ritual specialists, learned theologians, religious dissenters, magistrates, and governors who clashed and intermingled in the opening decades of colonization and resistance to it.

In The Roots of Democracy Robert E. Shalhope traces the dramatic shifts in attitudes and behavior from before the Revolution, through the war itself, and then on to the confederation period, the creation of republican governments, the making of the Constitution and the conflicts of the 1790s.

At the Center explores the mode of perception and reflection which grasped at consensus and sought to determine "centers" or orienting norms, and prevailed across many registers of thought, imagination, and practice in the 1950s, as well as the varieties of argument and expression that escaped inclusion within coherent wholes.