Searching for Order

"What Lears makes of that is clear from the quote he takes from Herman Melville at the book's outset: 'Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.' To summarize his sense of the transformation almost to the point of oversimplification: An earlier 19th century notion of 'manliness' gave way to an amoral militarism, which fused with a muscular new Protestantism and evolving theories of racial supremacy; these, in turn, conjoined with a new economic order in which capital made way for capitalism. All were able to meld because each began in the post-Civil War hunger for 'regeneration.' The result was an assertive, aggressive, frequently intolerant national identity."

Tim Rutten reviews Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 in the Los Angeles Times.