Intellectual History has experienced an embattled history. Scholars have constantly fought to assert their distinctiveness and gain respect. Social History constantly threatened Intellectual History throughout the 20th century. From the early 20th century through the 1930s, many major universities offered both Intellectual and Social History in the same course. These courses, taught by luminaries such as Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner and Carl Becker were popular and attracted many students. Yet, by the 1940s, Intellectual History began to emerge as a separate discipline.

Arthur O. Lovejoy, a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins, and Perry Miller, an American literature professor at Harvard propagated this rise. Considered the first academics to concentrate on the "History of Ideas" they successfully freed Intellectual History from the grasp of Social History and in so doing raised its status. Lovejoy's, The Great Chain of Being (1936) and Miller's, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), considered the seminal works for the History of Ideas, asserted the themes of tension and irony in history. These themes would influence the discipline for many years. Courses in Intellectual History, especially those taught by Miller, Merle Curti and Ralph Gabriel, gained wide popularity in the 1950s.

As Miller and Lovejoy were raising the status of the discipline, other schools of thought vying for prominence, would shape Intellectual History. The American Studies Movement helped further separate Intellectual History from Social History as it approached history by looking at "myth and symbol." This allowed Intellectual History to go off in a new direction and concentrate on individual intellectuals or schools of thought. Henry May's End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Time, 1912-1917 (1959) serves as a prominent example of this focus.

In the 1960s, during the time of political and social upheaval, many scholars now regarded Intellectual History, especially with its new approach, as an elitist practice and shed doubt on the ability of these historians to depict America as containing a cohesive mentality or a singular "national mind." The radicalism of the period promoted Social History as more acceptable. Approaching history from the 'bottom up" it focused on previously unexamined racial and ethnic groups as well as women. Scholars saw the "New Social History" as the only significant way to address social problems.

The assault from Social History created a crisis among intellectual historians. The proceedings of conferences, in the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as writings in reviews and articles, revealed the tensions that these scholars experienced. At the American Historical Association's conference in 1973, intellectual historians recognized the need to assert their discipline as still influential. They formed an Intellectual History Group, which published the first Intellectual History Newsletter in 1979. At a conference on American Intellectual History in Racine Washington in 1977, historians presented many papers discussing the conflict between American Social and Intellectual History. Despite the fact that Social History gained more popularity among students, the top universities still had many courses devoted solely to Intellectual History. Therefore, Social History failed to eclipse the discipline.

In the 1980s and 1990s English departments' fascinations with deconstruction, poststructuralism and postmodernism had an impact on how intellectual historians approached their craft. English scholars, who now focused on the meanings of words and passages, informed intellectual historians that they could no longer derive meaning from entire documents. Another assault on the traditional conceptions of Intellectual History came from Richard Rorty who proposed the ideas of neo-pragmatism and anti-foundationalism. Interestingly, Rorty's contribution revived interest in traditional pragmatism as expressed by John Dewey, William James and Charles Peirce. In The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (1994) John Patrick Diggins defended the approach to exploring irony and promoted the concepts of neo and traditional pragmatism.

From the 1990s intellectual historians, with all historians, have continued to struggle with the postmodernist claim that historical objectivity is elusive. Additionally, they are still challenged by the overreaching pressures brought by Social History. To relieve these concerns, Intellectual History has been paired with Cultural History at many universities. (The latter discipline deals with the ideas and images of human behavior and interaction.) Both disciplines show a significant trend toward exploring history from the "lower" spectrum of the population and both have focused on previously neglected groups. These new approaches prove that Intellectual History indeed has a staying power as an independent discipline.

Darnton, Robert. "Intellectual and Cultural History." In The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Hoopes, James. "The History of Ideas." In Encyclopedia of American Cultural & Intellectual History. Mary K Cayton and Peter W. Williams, eds. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001.