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Twentieth-Century Multiplicity explores the effect of the culture-wide sense that prevailing syntheses failed to account fully for the complexities of modern life. As Daniel H. Borus documents the belief that there were many truths, many beauties, and many values--a condition that the historian Henry Adams labeled multiplicity--rather than singular ones prompted new departures in a myriad of discourses and practices ranging from comic strips to politics to sociology. The new emphasis on contingency and context prompted Americans to rethink what counted as truth and beauty, how the self was constituted and societies cohered and functioned. The challenge to absolutes and universals, Borus shows, gave rise to a culture in which standards were not always firm and fixed and previously accepted hierarchies were not always valid. Although itself strenuously challenged, especially during the First World War, early twentieth-century multiplicity bequeathed to American cultural life an abiding sense of the complexity and diversity of things.
Twentieth-Century Multiplicity explores the effect of the culture-wide sense that prevailing syntheses failed to account fully for the complexities of modern life. As Daniel H. Borus documents the belief that there were many truths, many beauties, and many values--a condition that the historian Henry Adams labeled multiplicity--rather than singular ones prompted new departures in a myriad of discourses and practices ranging from comic strips to politics to sociology. The new emphasis on contingency and context prompted Americans to rethink what counted as truth and beauty, how the self was constituted and societies cohered and functioned. The challenge to absolutes and universals, Borus shows, gave rise to a culture in which standards were not always firm and fixed and previously accepted hierarchies were not always valid. Although itself strenuously challenged, especially during the First World War, early twentieth-century multiplicity bequeathed to American cultural life an abiding sense of the complexity and diversity of things.
Chapter 1: Twentieth-Century Multiplicity
Chapter 2: Foundations
Chapter 3: Beauties
Chapter 4: Selves
Chapter 5: Collectivities
Chapter 6: War
Chronology
Bibliographic Essay
Daniel H. Borus is professor of history at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market and the editor of These United States: Portraits of America in the 1920s.
Daniel Borus offers a panoramic and strikingly original account of
the dawn of American modernity. The pluralistic impulse that
energized every field of inquiry and impelled dazzling innovations
in aesthetic form emerges here as the defining feature of early
twentieth-century culture. Such familiar figures as Jane Addams and
W.E.B. Du Bois receive fresh treatment as critics of art and
culture, while Elsie Clews Parsons, Thorstein Veblen, and Walter
Weyl finally receive their due as the penetrating progressive
theorists they were. The parallels Borus finds between these
thinkers' exploration of multiplicity and Charlie Chaplin's silent
comedies, Scott Joplin's ragtime, and the 'Little Nemo' and 'Krazy
Kat' comic strips are among the many joys of this remarkable book.
A model of historical interpretation, Twentieth-Century
Multiplicity is itself an example of what remains vital in the
pluralistic imagination.
*Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University*
Borus explores the ideological and cultural aspects of this period
of rapid change and retreat. In clear, concise language, the author
explores multifarious concepts with depth and clarity, yet always
with a careful eye toward his audience. Especially noteworthy is
his work on the cataclysmic effect of WW I upon social conscience,
crucial to understanding the nation's turn toward isolationism
after the war. An indispensable work for any introductory study of
this era, as well as an excellent supplemental read for
upper-division undergraduate study. Essential.
*CHOICE*
Daniel Borus gives us clear, sympathetic, and astute readings of
the remarkable thinkers who in the early twentieth century
transformed the way we think about truth, value, self, and
society—and shows that Henry Adams was right to make multiplicity
the sign of the twentieth century. This is a marvelous book for
students and scholars alike.
*Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University*
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