Another response from H-Ideas: 
 
 
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Date: Sun, 12 Nov 1995 10:58:04 -0500 
From: [log in to unmask]  
Agnes Miklos Illes writes: "I am looking for literature on American cultural 
history (sociology, philosophy, economics etc.) of the period about 1920 - 
1960." 
 
I'd like some, too, and I'm distressed at how little has been written about 
the intellectual history of this period that tries to be comprehensive. I 
have a cultural history of the 70s, Peter Carroll, *It Seemed Like Nothing 
Happened*, NY: Holt, 1982, but that's after the period and like other, 
similar works, seems to me to be lacking in comparative perspectives and not 
fully informed of what was going on among academic, as opposed to more 
public, thinkers. 
I would hasten to recommend Paul Dickson's *Think Tanks*, NY: Ballantine 
paperback, 1971, a fine piece of journalism now hard to use because its 
original publication was in paperback. It does a superb job of describing the 
intellectual atmosphere and activity at these 50s and 60s non-universities 
called "think tanks" both the ones on the left (as they believed) and those 
on the right (pre-Pat Robertson). 
John Diggins's new history of US social thought through the lens of 
pragmatism (*The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge 
and Authority*, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1994) is very fine, I think, 
but I feel ignorant. What do others know? Must we fall back on Stow Persons 
or Eric Goldman? 
 
-Bill Everdell, Brooklyn