American Creation - Donetta Bessinger

American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

July 27th, 2010 | Author: emotornado

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American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century A solid introduction – David A. Bede – Singapore
Although the 1910s are often thought of as the tail end of the Progressive Era, Stansell makes a strong case that that decade actually saw the genesis of a social progressivism that slammed the door on the Victorian era in America. She also argues – a bit less convincingly – that the 1910s marked the beginning of New York’s Greenwich Village as we now know it. But whether you accept the latter thesis or not, there is no doubt that the legendary neighborhood played host to some of the most important social activism of the early twentieth century. Stansell provides an impressive overview of the events and the lives of the people behind them.

Given the sheer magnitude of her subject, Stansell is necessarily sketchy in places, and the book suffers on occasion from an overly wordy, academic style. But she does provide a succinct look at the era’s most important activists: especially Emma Goldman and also Randolph Bourne, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Mabel Dodge and many others. The book doesn’t pretend to be a biography of any of them but does whet the reader’s appetite for learning more about them all. The same is true of the events it describes, particularly the successes and failures of the labor movement and the evolution of the feminist movement beyond advocacy of women’s suffrage. (A particularly fascinating part of Stansell’s story is the tension between labor and feminism, a division that stymied the left back then much as it does now.) Stansell ends her narrative with a brief assessment of the Red Scare and the quick end it put to the radicalism she delineates earlier in the book. She doesn’t really examine the social progress of the otherwise-conservative 1920s and beyond or demonstrate how the radicalism of the 1910s laid the groundwork for it; but the case for that is quite clear after reading this.

The book contains little contextual information regarding the societal conditions of the preceding decades and almost none for the following ones, so Stansell’s argument is easier to appreciate if you already have some knowledge of those times. Still, it is a good overview of an underappreciated bridge between two well-documented eras, the people who got us across that bridge, and the environment they lived in. If you want to learn about America in the 1910s, this book may or may not tell you all you want to know. But if not, it will definitely lay the groundwork for understanding whatever event or person you’re most interested in.
Beautifull and Erudite – –
I was amazed by the erudition of this book. So much knowledge and so many chunky footnotes, yet the author never weighs you down with all she knows (and she really knows her stuff). You get an new and amazing understanding of not just New York but America in the early 20th c.
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In the early twentieth century, an exuberant brand of gifted men and women moved to New York City, not to get rich but to participate in a cultural revolution. For them, the city’s immigrant neighborhoods–home to art, poetry, cafes, and cabarets in the European tradition–provided a place where the fancies and forms of a new America could be tested. Some called themselves Bohemians, some members of the avant-garde, but all took pleasure in the exotic, new, and forbidden.

In American Moderns, Christine Stansell tells the story of the most famous of these neighborhoods, Greenwich Village, which–thanks to cultural icons such as Eugene O’Neill, Isadora Duncan, and Emma Goldman–became a symbol of social and intellectual freedom. Stansell eloquently explains how the mixing of old and new worlds, politics and art, and radicalism and commerce so characteristic of New York shaped the modern American urban scene. American Moderns is both an examination and a celebration of a way of life that’s been nearly forgotten.

“On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf once wrote, “human character changed.” In the great capitals of Europe and America, the gray veil of Victorian values lifted; modernism, once the province of a few artistic experimenters, took the fore; subjects hitherto not considered to be fit for polite society, from women’s rights to free love, became the subjects of parlor discussion.

New York’s Greenwich Village, writes Princeton University historian Christine Stansell in this engaging study, became the epicenter of this great social earthquake. Fueled by wealthy patrons and fed by refugees from Europe and the Midwest, New York’s once isolated bohemian community generated social trends that would be widely copied, and in the process “made Greenwich Village into a beacon of American possibility in the new age.” Among their number were the anarchist politician Emma Goldman, the radical journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant, and the writers Eugene O’Neill and Kenneth Burke, all of whom insisted on making an art form of one’s life–and on rattling a few cages while doing so. The individual actors in this social revolution, Stansell observes, may be little remembered today, but elements of their belief–openness in social relationships, equality among men and women, and “a skepticism at once relentlessly questioning of America and entirely embroiled in its future”–are our common coin today. –Gregory McNamee
American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

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Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)

July 22nd, 2010 | Author: emotornado

Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia) : Gordon S. Wood–winner of the Pulitzer Prize and professor of American history at Brown University–had no idea what he was getting into when he began this 653-page book. Innocently, he wanted to write a “monographic analysis of constitution-making in the Revolutionary era.” Little did he know he would discover an intellectual world where a complete transformation of political thought was occurring, one that would create “a distinctly American system of politics.” As Wood explains, “Beneath the variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion there emerged a general pattern of beliefs about the social process–a set of common assumptions about history, society, and politics that connected and made significant seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas. Really for the first time I began to glimpse what late eighteenth-century Americans meant when they talked about living in an enlightened age.” This original study of the American political system is a strong contribution to the scholarly studies of the events surrounding the nation’s independence.
Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)

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Posted in American Creation | Tags: 17761787, American, Creation, Culture, History, Institute, Omohundro, Published, Republic, Virginia, Williamsburg | No Comments »

Donetta Bessinger

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American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)