| This dissertation, The Aesthetic Republic: Art, Education, and Social Imagination in the United States, 1900-1960, reconceives the history of the modern American art education movement as a study in American ideas. It expands the topic's boundaries to include a variety of thinkers and institutions beyond the pedagogical and curricular narrows, incorporating those whose philosophical work and mobilizing ideals connected the project of promoting art experience to key intellectual conversations of the period stretching from the progressive era to the early Cold War. Key figures include John Dewey, George Santayana, Holger Cahill, Victor D'Amico, Viktor Lowenfeld, Horace Kallen, and Thomas Munro. Organizing the movement's varied discourses around the notion of "the aesthetic republic," the dissertation offers an alternative to the declension narrative that has long dominated the story of American art education during this period by arguing that we should see the movement's importance within a more expansive constellation of social thought and cultural criticism. |
