Word: heimert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Alan E. Heimert's "Appreciation" of Miller is the longest and easily the most important article in the Review. It divides into three parts: an outline of the contents of Miller's work, a sketch of Miller's approach to intellectual history, and a personal reminisence. He tells the history of The New England Mind, Jonathan Edwards, the anthologies, and The Life of the Mind in America, Miller's projected study of national character in the years between 1775 and 1865. Miller would use the "artist" as an "entrance to the understanding of American society," Heimert explains...
Suggestive as they are, the interest of the first two parts is eclipsed by the intimate note of the last. For those of us who knew Miller only by reputation or from the back of Sever II, Heimert's references to his astounding industry or to "the sensitive discernment with which he savored every note-card in his numerous 'shoe-boxes'" fills in a part of the man we never knew. The fascination of the Miller "enigma" appeals to our human interest and excuses our lazy reluctance to follow his difficult thought. Yet for the student, Heimert's interpretation...
...NATION SO CONCEIVED, by Rienhold Niebuhr and Alan Heimert, Scribner...
...Nation So Conceived, Reinhold Niebuhr and Alan Heimert explore this peculiar Messianic conception Americans have of their own history. The authors organize their material into three major categories: 1. "The quest for national unity and identity." 2. The impact of industrialism on an agrarian state. 3. "The transformation of the nation's original sense of mission to its present sense of responsibility...." Each of these categories is treated in a single chapter, and the entire book runs only to 155 pages. Such brevity on so sweeping a theme creates difficulties. The authors present their work in a wonderfully clear, concise...
Recent history, according to Niebuhr and Heimert, reveals two such consequences: a sometimes embarrassing anti-imperialism and an unreasonable belief that American constitutional democracy will--and should--serve for all peoples. "The challenge," they explain, "is so great because it meets a nation which has always been certain of its virtue and which has a new sense of its power." The ambiguities of our present situation in international politics, they say, is in many ways a result of our phenomenally rapid transformation from relative obscurity to world leadership. "In every aspect of our national life we have been forced...