I am pleased to post the following from Michael O’Brien, Professor of American Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. This was originally the keynote lecture O’Brien delivered on February 21, 2013 at Mercer University, at the 25th annual meeting of the Southern Intellectual History Circle, a group O’Brien helped to found in the late 1980s. Readers here will particularly enjoy O’Brien’s discussion of how a scholarly community dedicated to intellectual history developed and functioned, his reflections on Eugene Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, C. Vann Woodward, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and his thoughts on the relationship of intellectual history to other subfields Read more