Capper, Charles

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Capper, Charles

(Charles H. Capper)

PERSONAL:

Education: Johns Hopkins University, B.A., 1966; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1984.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, Boston University, 226 Bay State Rd., Boston, MA 02215. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Academic and historian. San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, lecturer, 1976-82; San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, lecturer, 1976-82; University of California, Berkeley, acting instructor, 1983-84; University of California, Davis, visiting assistant professor, 1984-86; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assistant professor, 1986-92, associate professor, 1992-2000, professor of history and American studies, 2000-01; Boston University, Boston, MA, professor of history, 2001—. National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1987-88; University of North Carolina, Institute for the Arts and Humanities fellow, 1990, 1999; National Humanities Center fellow, 1994-95; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow, 1995-96; National Humanities Center Lilly fellow, 2002-03; Harvard University, Charles Warren Center fellow, 2005-06.

MEMBER:

Massachusetts Historical Society, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Bancroft prize, Columbia University, 1993, for Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life; Binkley-Stephenson Award, Organization of American Historians, 1999, for best scholarly article published in the Journal of American History; recipient of research grants.

WRITINGS:

(With David A. Hollinger) The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook, two volumes, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1989, 5th edition, 2006.

Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), Volume 1: The Private Years, 1992, Volume 2: The Public Years, 2007.

(Editor, with Conrad Edick Wright) Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, MA), 1999.

(Editor, with Cristina Giorcelli) Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age, foreword by Lester K. Little, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals and journals, including Intellectual History Newsletter, Reviews in American History, American Historical Review, American Quarterly, Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter, and Journal of American History. Coeditor of Modern Intellectual History, 2002—. On editorial advisory board of "American Thought and Culture" series of the University of Wisconsin Press. Referee for a number of journals and publishing houses, including American Historical Review, American Quarterly, Journal of American History, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Cornell University Press, Duke University Press, Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, St. Martin's Press, and the University of North Carolina Press.

SIDELIGHTS:

Charles Capper is an academic and historian, serving as a professor of history at Boston University in Massachusetts. With David A. Hollinger, Capper published The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook in 1989. The two volumes went into their fifth edition in 2006.

Capper published Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life in 1992. This two-volume study looks into the life of transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, covering the first thirty "public" years of her life in one volume and the last decade of her "private" life in the other volume.

As for the private life volume, Bell Gale Chevigny, writing in the Nation, said that "for Capper, intellectual history is rooted in closely observed social culture, and his conception of Fuller's associates in New England as an avant-garde helps immeasurably in recapturing their bold vitality and complexity. His commitment to understanding the problem of the female intellectual carries him into subtle and flexible psychological speculation. This is not a thesis-driven book, but through thickets of engrossing contexts, Capper follows the thread of Fuller's ambition as it seeks meaningful form." Chevigny noted that "while Capper draws on psychological theory, he also takes Fuller and her friends at their word; that is, he uses their language and myriad views to weave a contextual web around thorny emotional encounters and to render complex judgment." Mary Kelley, writing in Reviews in American History, remarked that "this subtly nuanced biography presents Fuller in her many dimensions. The sharply edged wit, the gift for friendship, the passion for matters intellectual and cultural, the intense ambition, the lingering insecurity, all that complicated Fuller are here." Kelley stated: "Surprisingly, Capper devotes only sixteen of the 350 pages in the biography to the ‘Conversations.’ He does note that Fuller's educational objective was ‘strikingly original’ (p. 294). And he does comment on the obstacles that antebellum America's gender relations posed to a female life that integrated thought and action." Kelley continued, saying that "although Capper chronicles the ‘Conversations,’ he misses an important opportunity to explore them as an intellectual institution in their own right. Indeed, the ‘Conversations’ were a female counterpart to the ‘Transcendental Club,’ an institution described by Capper as a ‘major male intellectual society’ (p. 216). In their intellectual and social commitments, the women engaged in the ‘Conversations’ were strikingly similar to the ‘Club's’ members. Participants in both institutions also shared philosophical, religious, and literary concerns. Perhaps most notably, both institutions had an impact that went far beyond the deeply engaged members and their lively meetings." Kelley concluded that "Capper's biography provides us with a model for the practice of intellectual history more generally. There are other women to be recovered, other distortions to be undone. The resulting transformation of American intellectual history may well startle all of us, at least initially. Nonetheless, the more representative character of that history will surely serve us well."

Reviewing the second volume of Capper's biography of Fuller, Jan Brue Enright, writing in Library Journal, found that even though the book is "lengthy and extremely detailed, this narrative of a fascinating woman … is very readable." A contributor to the Atlantic Monthly remarked that Capper's biography of Fuller provides the reader with an understanding of Fuller that "is as complete as the art of biography allows."

In 1999, Capper edited Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts with Conrad Edick Wright. The book traces its origins to a conference at the Massachusetts Historical Society and includes twenty essays on Transcendentalism. The book is primarily organized into categories such as religion, social issues, reform, and cultures. Many of the contributors seek to clarify the definition of Transcendentalism itself through the works of its more famous contributors.

Howard A. Barnes, writing in History: Review of New Books, commented that "the general tone of the volume is overwhelmingly positive. Several writers, in a somewhat elegiac tone, observe that Transcendentalism no longer holds a central place in American intellectual history and literature. This is to be expected, considering changing tastes and an embattled canon. However, this attractively presented volume … with its carefully edited essays, may go far in preserving interest in the subject." Barnes called the volume an "excellent volume of essays."

In 2007, Capper, with Cristina Giorcelli, edited another book on Fuller, called Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, April, 1994, Jane H. Pease, review of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Volume 1, p. 651; October, 2001, Bruce A. Ronda, review of Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, p. 1351.

American Literature, December, 1993, William W. Stowe, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 785.

American Studies, fall, 1994, Cheryl Rose Jacobsen, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 159.

Atlantic Monthly, January 1, 2008, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 2, p. 132.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 1993, E. Kuhlman, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 1375; September, 2000, M. Cantor, review of Transient and Permanent, p. 206.

History: Review of New Books, spring, 2000, Howard A. Barnes, review of Transient and Permanent, p. 106.

Journal of American History, June, 1994, Mary Kupiec Cayton, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 267; June, 2001, James Perrin Warren, review of Transient and Permanent, p. 206.

Journal of American Studies, August, 1991, Henry Claridge, review of The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook, p. 301.

Journal of Church and State, autumn, 2001, Holton T. Kevin, review of Transient and Permanent, p. 832.

Journal of Religion, October, 2001, W. Clark Gilpin, review of Transient and Permanent, p. 644.

Journal of the Early Republic, summer, 1993, Edith Gelles, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 283.

Journal of Women's History, fall, 1994, Winifred D. Wandersee, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 140.

Library Journal, June 15, 2007, Jan Brue Enright, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 2, p. 69.

London Review of Books, November 15, 2007, Megan Marshall, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 2, p. 16.

NWSA Journal, fall, 1995, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 115.

Nation, October 4, 1993, Bell Gale Chevigny, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 357.

New England Quarterly, March, 1996, Christina Zwarg, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 128.

New Republic, June 21, 1993, Christine Stansell, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 40.

New York Review of Books, February 2, 1995, Millicent Bell, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 17.

Nineteenth-Century Literature, June, 1993, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 134; December, 2000, review of Transient and Permanent, p. 432.

Reference & Research Book News, May, 2000, review of Transient and Permanent, p. 153; November, 2002, review of Transient and Permanent, p. 209.

Reviews in American History, March, 1995, Mary Kelley, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 33.

Times Higher Education Supplement, March 18, 1994, David Watson, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 23.

Times Literary Supplement, May 25, 1990, Harold Beaver, review of The American Intellectual Tradition, p. 549; December 21, 2007, Clare Pettitt, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 2, p. 12.

Women's Review of Books, June, 1993, Susan Belasco Smith, review of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1, p. 23.