The Tyranny of Change

Between 1890 and 1920, the forces accompanying industrialization sent the familiar nineteenth-century world plummeting toward extinction. The traditional countryside with its villages and family farms was eclipsed by giant corporations and sprawling cities. In lively, accessible prose, John Chambers [...]
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Between 1890 and 1920, the forces accompanying industrialization sent the familiar nineteenth-century world plummeting toward extinction. The traditional countryside with its villages and family farms was eclipsed by giant corporations and sprawling cities. In lively, accessible prose, John Chambers incorporates into his book the latest scholarship about the social, cultural, political, and economic changes that produced modern America. He illuminates the experiences of blacks, Asians, Latinos, as well as other working men and women in the cities and countryside as they struggled to improve their lives in a transformed economy. Striding these pages are many of the prominent individuals who shaped the attitudes and institutions of modern America: J. P. Morgan and corporate reorganization; Jane Addams and the origin of modern social work; Mary Pickford and the new star-oriented motion picture industry; and the radical labor challenge of "Big Bill" Haywood and the "Wobblies."While recognizing a "progressive ethos"-a mixture of idealistic vision and pragmatic reforms that characterized the period-Chambers elaborates the role of civic volunteerism as well as the state in achieving directed social change. He also emphasizes the importance of radical and conservative forces in shaping the so-called "Progressive Era." The revised edition of this classic work has an updated bibliography and a new preface, both of which incorporate particularly the new social and cultural research of the past decade. John Whiteclay Chambers II is professor of history at Rutgers University. He recently co-edited The New Conscientious Objection and is the author of To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America.