Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: opening American thought / James T. Kloppenberg -- Part I. Frames -- What was the American enlightenment? / Caroline Winterer -- The "woman question" in the age of mass democracy: from movement history to problem history / Leslie Butler -- "We people of color": colored cosmopolitanism and the borders of race / Nico Slate -- Curating the Black atlantic / Jonathan Holloway -- Part II. Justice -- The sins of slaves and the slaves of sin: toward a history of moral agency / Margaret Abruzzo -- Nationalism and cosmopolitan humanity in mid-nineteenth-century American political science / Duncan Kelly -- The political origins of global justice / Samuel Moyn -- Part III. Philosophy -- Unstiffening theory: the Italian magic pragmatists and William James / Francesca Bordogna -- The longing for wisdom in twentieth-century US thought / Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen -- Pain, analytical philosophy, and American intellectual history / Joel Isaac -- On lying: writing philosophical history after the enlightenment and after Arendt / Sophia Rosenfeld -- Part IV. Secularization -- Science and religion in postwar America / Andrew Jewett -- Religion within the bounds of democracy alone: Habermas, Rawls, and the trans-Atlantic debate over public reason / Peter Gordon -- Christianity and its American fate: where history interrogates secularization theory / David Hollinger -- Part V. Method -- Paths in the social history of ideas / Daniel T. Rodgers -- Toward a free-range intellectual history / Sarah Igo -- New directions, then and now / Angus Burgin -- Afterword / Michael O'Brien.