I am currently a lecturer on U.S. history at Harvard, where I completed my dissertation, “Related States: Pragmatism, Progressivism, and Internationalism in American Thought and Politics, 1880-1920,” in June 2008 under the direction of James T. Kloppenberg. My dissertation explored how American progressives, inspired by William James’s pragmatism, influenced Woodrow Wilson’s ideas of domestic and international justice and shaped America’s first internationalist foreign policy. This policy was epitomized in Wilson’s vision for a League of Nations that was egalitarian, animated by deliberative discourse, and demanded a significant relinquishment of sovereignty from its members. Yet by repressing dissent and abandoning public dialogue during World War I, Wilson squandered the chance to realize his vision: His failure to match democratic means to democratic ends eroded support for the incipient global government he championed, and accelerated the postwar rollback of his domestic reforms. This new perspective on the Wilson years reveals that egalitarian domestic and foreign policies, derived from philosophical pragmatism, were realistic options that failed for contingent reasons; it also suggests that pragmatism can help us formulate practical policies for the present.

By investigating the intersection of social thought, domestic politics, and international events, my work demonstrates the potential of rigorous, primary-source based intellectual history to increase our understanding of the human factors driving policy making, as well as the interplay of domestic and foreign events that forms its context. In revising my dissertation for publication, I will expand my analysis of Wilson’s checkered record on racial justice and women’s rights, to test more thoroughly the egalitarian potential of the principles he espoused. I hope also to engage bodies of literature in political science and international relations, to situate the political theory of Wilson and the pragmatist progressives among its historical and contemporary alternatives, evaluate the specific policies their pragmatism implied in the early twentieth century, and determine and test those policies it might imply for today.

Both my service and teaching at Harvard reflect my skepticism of rigid methodological boundaries and my conception of history as a shifting set of questions, not a static collection of subjects. Serving for two years as a co-organizer of Harvard’s international history seminar brought me into conversation with diverse scholars from across the country and the world. Teaching intellectual history trained me to foster students’ appreciation of the extreme specificity of historical moments—exemplified by precise ideas formulated in particular circumstances—while demonstrating the persistence of basic human concerns across time. Teaching international history alongside international-relations theory helped me draw students’ attention to the multiple narratives that emerge when national histories are examined as convergences of local and transnational phenomena, and taught me and my students to challenge theories of human interaction while learning from the questions they raise. My current course, “War and the World of Ideas in America, Civil War to Iraq,” draws upon these experiences, guiding students in analyzing primary sources that reveal war’s impact on the ways Americans have conceptually and morally ordered their world. I hope it spurs students to interrogate their own views, and recognize that like all historical phenomena, ideas and their effects exhibit ironic trajectories that should foster humility in our present thinking about the order of things. I am excited to teach similar courses in future, and to participate, as a scholar and student of my peers, in the life of a community that will enhance my work, and be enhanced in turn.

Contact Info

Robinson Hall

35 Quincy Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

throntv [at] fas.harvard.edu

• CV
• Abstract
• "Common Counsel": Woodrow Wilson's Pragmatic Progressivism, 1885-1913
• The Will to Behold: Thorstein Veblen's Pragmatic Aesthetics