Bruce Schulman named 2025 Guggenheim Fellow
The RAI congratulates Bruce Schulman on being named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow.
Bruce Schulman is the William E. Huntington Professor of History at Boston University. He was the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford in 2022-2023, and was recently named a Rothermere American Institute Distinguished Fellow.
Bruce intends to use the Guggenheim award to finish a longstanding book, Brand Name America, and launch a new project, The (New) American Political Tradition. He explains both projects below.
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Brand Name America explores the transformation of American nationhood between 1896 and 1929 -- the era in which the United States emerged as a world power, international economic leader, and reservoir for displaced persons from across the globe. In 1898, Americans like Senator Albert Beveridge could still wonder whether the Stars and Stripes flew over a “great nation” or merely an “aggregration of localities.” Beveridge’s question highlighted profound worries among his contemporaries about the cohesiveness of the United States and the need to rethink the very nature of American nationhood at the turn of the century. More and more Americans saw the potential for the nation to become not merely a union of like-minded entities but an integrated whole, knitting together not only diverse regions but also healing divisions of class and national origin. Powered by advances in communication and transportation, it became possible--even necessary--to conceive of the United States as a single national market, a national audience for cultural products like film, recorded music, and radio, and even the site of a unified American culture. In the era of name brand products, the United States took on something like its own band name identity.
The (New) American Political Tradition: And the People Who Made It, by contrast, will seek to make sense of the raucous half-century of American life since the 1960s. Inspired by historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1948 account, this book deploys portraits of prominent individuals and small groups to examine enduring traditions that have shaped American public life, persistent styles and practices of American politics, and distinctive ways Americans have participated in the public arena: how they imagined, described, organized, and engaged in political action.
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The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awards the highly prestigious fellowships annually to enable individuals with ‘prior career achievement’ and ‘exceptional promise’ to pursue independent scholarship ‘under the freest possible conditions.’ The 2025 class of Guggenheim Fellows, includes 198 distinguished individuals working across 53 disciplines.
