5604 Rebirth of a Nation The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 by Jackson Lears (read 23 Dec 2018) When my good niece donated almost 200 books to me recently, this book, first published in 2008, was among them and it caught my attention and I wanted to read it. It is a learned book, usually called 'cultural history', and I found it was a bit more intellectual than the usual history I much enjoy. So the book had good things in it and enjoyable pages, but also was 'heavy' at times and less fun to read. The author's views were sound and I especially was in accord with his view of Teddy Roosevelt as a war lover and actually a shallow thinker. His words on Woodrow Wilson ring true--Wilson was attracted to the right things but the author faults hm for thinking it necessary to enter the World War to get his views on world organization accepted. The book studies the effect of the Civil War, the growing power of money, the attitude to race in the years indicated in the title, the effect of the ending of the frontier, the role of Bryan, and the beginning of America's grasping for empire, as well as the beginning of America as a world power. A good book but not an easy read. ( )

The cover is a photo of a span bridge under construction, and I suspect that the book designer had read the book and realized that it, like the bridge, had two or three really strong points but was otherwise more or less dangling, disconnected bits and pieces.

I was primed to love this: I needed to read something about the time period anyway; Lears throws in quotes by people I love but historians usually don't touch (e.g., the Henrys Adams and James); he's no averse to actually, like, trying to tell you what happened (rather than banging on about contingency and the deeply individualistic sufferings of short-sighted workers in the Pimlinail factory of Northern Workerville's easter district in the third week of March, 1875) and he's open to the fact that you need to theorize in order to explain what happened. And yet.

The obvious problem that faces a historiographer, particularly if you're seeking a wider audience, is that you probably don't think writing according to chronology is possible. Prohibition needs a narrative different from the narrative that Militarism needs, even if they're connected; so maybe you have thematic chapters? And then, of course, you end up repeating yourself over and over and over... as Lears does.

The obvious problem is that you're probably too intelligent to write a simple Great Man story about what the Presidents were doing during this time period, so you choose a theme: here, the trope of rebirth or regeneration of self/nation/humankind. Great theme. But how exactly do you expound your theme while still giving enough detail? Well, I sure as heck wouldn't want to try. Lears fails at it. He dutifully re-states his theme at the start and end of every chapter, but in between there's very little indication that the facts and stories he tells are connected by this theme, and if so, how, why we should care, and how it all hangs together. If you think the U.S. during this time period is best understood as Regeneration Nation, you need to explain why.

So without chronology or coherent theme to connect the chapters, or the sections, or the paragraphs, the book comes out, I fear, like a big miscellany. It has a *great* bibliographical essay at the end, but that's probably the best thing about the book. Better written than your standard history? On a sentence level, yes. But sentences make paragraphs, which make sections, which make chapters. And having all of them hang together is also a part of good writing. ( )

Lears looks at America from the end of the Civil War to the end of WWI. Here was the rise of corporate industrialism along with the efforts of farmers and laborers to oppose the plutocrats of industrial wealth. America also retreated from isolationism to fight a war with Spain (which gave the country a foreign empire) and to join the Allies is WWI. Lears is an unabashed advocate of people without wealth at home and of peace abroad.
This period has been surveyed many times by American historians. Lears furthers our knowledge by incorporating a detailed look at the commercial advertising of the era. And the George Bush II administration seems to have opened the way for left-leaning historians to be critical not only of the saber-rattling of Teddy Roosevelt but also of the international idealism of Woodrow Wilson.
Lears provides an informed, opinionated, courageous, and sometimes unusually insightful description of the era that will appeal most intensely to latter-day populists and pacifists, but will inform everyone. Here Lears is perhaps not quite so brilliant as he was in "No Place of Grace", but he has produced a valuable and well-argued interpretation of the birth of the corporate, capitalist, militarist America that we know today. ( )