	about search site map editors donate contact help

A Century's Retrospective

The H-Ideas Year 2000
Book Review Project

Call for reviewers

List of nominations

List of commissions

Text of "A Century's Retrospective"

Style manual for contributors

What is "A Century's Retrospective"?

The H-Ideas Editors invite all members of the H-Net community to participate in a once-in-a-century opportunity, a year-long retrospective of the most important and influential works of intellectual history and the history of ideas published in the 20th century. The project will consist of a series of scholarly review essays of these works to be published in chronological order over the course of the coming year.

Ideally, the editors hope to select at least 50 texts, if not more, from the titles nominated, and to present review essays, on average one per week, for the year 2000. Although reviews will be published in English, the editors are especially eager to include important works by Asian, Latin American, and non-Western scholars whose work warrants greater recognition by the international community of intellectual historians.

Since it was introduced in the summer of 1999, "A Century's Retrospective" has been featured prominently on the H-Net homepage and was publicized in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Over 175 list members sent in nominations (see "List of nominations"). Many of the titles nominated, although not all, have been included in the project. After the essays have been published online, the editors will consider the possibility of compiling them for traditional print publication.

Call for reviewers

This is more than a once-in-a-century opportunity. Owing to the development of the Internet, it is in fact the first such opportunity of its kind in the history of scholarship. The Editors are unaware of any other similar projects planned for 2000. The Retrospective will be archived on the H-Ideas website and will be an invaluable resource to scholars for years to come.

We invite all scholars, not just those subscribed to H-Ideas, to contribute to the project. Indeed, "A Century's Retrospective" will succeed only if the entire H-Net community actively involves itself in the project. We invite you to volunteer to review one or more of the titles below, and hope that the reviews will give all of us occasion to reconsider the significance of these works to their particular areas of study as well as to the field of intellectual history in general.

Like other H-Net reviews, the Retrospective reviews will be published on H-Ideas and on H-Review and may be picked up for cross-posting by other H-Net lists as well as available to anyone who searches the growing body of H-Net's archive of reviews. The reviews will also be published online as a discrete volume, complete with a title page and table of contents.

To submit your name for consideration for a commission to write a review, please send your e-mail response to mreger1301@aol.com, along with a brief note describing your position and institutional affiliation, if applicable. You may also send your response by regular posting to Mark Reger, English Department, Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, North Carolina, 28216.

List of nominations

[By Date]

[By Author]

List of commissions

The following reviews have already been commissioned (last updated 1/9/01). The asterisk (*) indicates that the review has already been published.

1900-1910
Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians
* Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion 1911-1920
G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century

1921-1930
* Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges
Vernon Parrington, Main Currents of American Thought
Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit

1931-1940
* Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers
* Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony
Friedrich Meinecke, Die entstehung des historismus
* Qian Mu, Zhongguo jin sanbai nian xueshushi
* Perry Miller, The New England Mind
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx

1941-1950
Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, and Freud: Critique of a Heritage
Lucien Febvre, Le Probleme de l'incroyance au XVIe siecle
Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas
* Morton White, Social Thought in America

1951-1960
* Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism
Rupert Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800
Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance
Reinhard Koselleck, Critique and Crisis
* Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind
* H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society

1961-1970
John Herman Randall, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science
* Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism
Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939
Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind

1971-1980
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration
Henry May, The Enlightenment in America
Georges Duby, Les trois orders
* Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

1981-1990
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World
* Steve Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump
Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream
* Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions

1991-2000
Dorothy Ross, The Origin of American Social Science
Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge
* J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings