Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Modernization and Tradition, 1870-1920

Abstract

LeRoy Ashby. Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1890-1917. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.313 + xiii pp. William J. Breen. Uncle Sam at Home: Civilian Mobilization, Wartime Federalism, and the Council of National Defense, 1917-1919. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. 279 + xvii pp. Sean Dennis Cashman. America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: New York University Press, 1984.370 + xiv pp. Donald J. Mrozek. Sport and American Mentality, 1880-1910. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983. 284 + xx pp. Michael Pearlman. To Make Democracy Safe for America: Patricians and Preparedness in the Progressive Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.297 + ix pp. John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983. 399 + xi pp. Edward Wagenknecht. American Profile, 1900-1909. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.365 + ix pp. When facing an examination in U.S. history, I was always relieved to read a nice, broad question such as this: "Were innovators, organizers, social critics and reformers of the period 1870-1920 primarily nostalgic or forward-looking?" Confronted with seven books as disparate as these, I have to imagine myself answering such a question.