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Article Excerpt
REBIRTH OF A NATION
The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
By Jackson Lears Harper
432 pp. | $27.99
Whether he meant to or not, Jackson Lears has become the historian of American yearning. Rebirth of a Nation is his fourth venture into that territory and the second focused on the tumults of the years between the end of Reconstruction and the end of World War I. The first, No Place of Grace (1981), is an elegant, perceptive account of the aesthetes and intellectuals who shuddered at the voraciousness of the Industrial Age and longed for the passion and authenticity they ascribed to life in the Middle Ages, the Orient, and cultures unsullied by modernization. Fables of Abundance (1994) chronicles the rise of the advertising business, which prospered by inventing "needs" and inflaming desires for happiness of every description. And Something for Nothing (2002) presents three centuries' worth of Americans handing themselves over to chance and praying for deliverance from the Protestant work ethic.
Rebirth of a Nation features an enormous and variegated cast of characters, all of them longing for regeneration--of mind, of body, of national will. Their yearnings arose from myriad anxieties: about the ruination lurking...
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