Matthew Specter (Lecturer, Stanford & Berkeley) will present "The First Atlantic Realist Moment: U.S. and German Intellectual Discourse on 'World Politics,' 1880-1910" Abstract: In contrast to other historians who have emphasized the cataclysms of the 1930s and 40s as the matrix from which a "realist" foreign policy sensibility sprung, Specter shifts our attention to the 1880s and 90s, when the US and Germany sought to challenge Great Britain and pursue power on a global scale. As Germany and US both…

In recent years, intellectual history has reestablished itself as a distinct and vital field of scholarship, with a new attention to the social and cultural contexts of thought as well as to language, rhetoric, and meaning.  Even as the field has applied insights from a broad range of other disciplines, and especially from literary studies and philosophy, its practitioners have sought an understanding of thinkers, ideas, and texts that is emphatically historical. The Triangle Intellectual History Seminar, a partnership with…