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Original Essays | September 23, 2009

Jonathan Lethem: IMG Stops: On Those Things My New Novel Forgot to Be About, Maybe



For me, there's a weird, unfathomable gulf — I almost wrote gulp — between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has... Continue »
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    Chronic City

    Jonathan Lethem

The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900--1920 (Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History)

by Eric Rauchway

The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900--1920 (Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History) Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

The Progressives — those reformers responsible for the shape of many American institutions, from the Federal Reserve Board to the New School for Social Research — have always presented a mystery. What prompted middle-class citizens to support fundamental change in American life? Eric Rauchway shows that like most of us, the reformers took their inspiration from their own lives — from the challenges of forming a family.

Review:

"Every scholar grappling with the elusive and complicated Progressive Era should read this graceful essay on these three quintessentially progressive families. In prose as nuanced as the fin-de-siècle itself, Rauchway explores the lives of these women and men who engendered a potent ideology of political reform by using the family as a vessel of political and social change. Rauchway marries group biography to gender studies in his intelligent, sensitive, and eloquent portraits of these Progressive intellectuals." Mina Carson, Oregon State University

Synopsis:

The Progressives — those reformers responsible for the shape of many American institutions, from the Federal Reserve Board to the New School for Social Research — have always presented a mystery. What prompted middle-class citizens to support fundamental change in American life? Eric Rauchway shows that like most of us, the reformers took their inspiration from their own lives — from the challenges of forming a family.

Following the lives and careers of Charles and Mary Beard, Wesley Clair and Lucy Sprague Mitchell, and Willard and Dorothy Straight, the book moves from the plains of the Midwest to the plains of Manchuria, from the trade-union halls of industrial Britain to the editorial offices of the New Republic in Manhattan. Rauchway argues that parenting was a kind of elitism that fulfilled itself when it undid itself, and this vision of familial responsibility underlay Progressive approaches to foreign policy, economics, social policy, and education.

Description:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-229) and index.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780231121477
Subtitle:
Family and American Reform Politics, 1900--1920
Author:
Rauchway, Eric
Publisher:
Columbia University Press
Location:
New York
Subject:
Social Policy
Subject:
History
Subject:
History & Theory
Subject:
Family
Subject:
United States - 20th Century
Subject:
Social reformers
Subject:
Progressivism
Subject:
History & Theory - General
Subject:
Public Policy - Social Policy
Subject:
Progressivism (united states politics)
Subject:
Family -- United States -- History.
Edition Description:
Paperback
Series:
Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History (Paperback)
Publication Date:
March 2001
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
322
Dimensions:
887x591x53 77

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