James Livingston

Professor Livingston has written on a wide variety of topics in intellectual, literary, and economic history—for example, he has published essays on works by William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Dreiser, Walt Disney, and Richard Rorty. His first book was Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 (1986). He then turned to the study of cultural change in the U.S. ca. 1890-1930, which resulted in Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (1994). While completing the second book, he noticed that pragmatism and feminism intersected as social movements and intellectual currents in the early 20th century. His study of this intersection led to Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (2001). Livingston is now at work on a book entitled The Origins of Our Time: Sources of the American Centuries, 1896-1946, in which he argues that everything we take for granted in the early 21st century (including American cultural hegemony in the world) was invented in the fifty years before the dawn of the first "American Century."


_{Photo Credit: Bruce Williams Photography}