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Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900, by George Cotkin
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In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans were faced with the challenges and uncertainties of a new era. The comfortable Victorian values of continuity, progress, and order clashed with the unsettling modern notions of constant change, relative truth, and chaos. Attempting to embrace the intellectual challenges of modernism, American thinkers of the day were yet reluctant to welcome the wholesale rejection of the past and destruction of traditional values.
In Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900, George Cotkin surveys the intellectual life of this crucial transitional period. His story begins with the Darwinian controversies, since the mainstream of American culture was just beginning to come to grips with the implications of the Origins of Species, published in 1859. Cotkin demonstrates the effects of this shift in thinking on philosophy, anthropology, and the newly developing field of psychology. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of these fields, he explains clearly and concisely the essential tenets of such major thinkers and writers as William James, Franz Boas, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry Adams, and Kate Chopin. Throughout this fascinating, readable history of the American fin de si�cle run the contrasting themes of continuity and change, faith and rationalism, despair over the meaninglessness of life and, ultimately, a guarded optimism about the future.
- Sales Rank: #3449537 in eBooks
- Published on: 2004-09-15
- Released on: 2013-07-18
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
The contribution of this book to the field is that it is a well-organized, clearly written, and very readable work on this period in American thought and culture. It will be a welcome addition to the literature and should easily be used in undergraduate courses on nineteenth-century American culture. (Regina Morantz-Sanchez, University of Michigan)
This fine book is both a useful summary and an original treatment of a uniquely interesting and pivotal period. (James Hoopes, Babson College)
In a comprehensive synthesis of recent scholarship as well as a reconsideration of sources from the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, George Cotkin provides an impressive interpretation of U.S. thought and culture at a time of intellectual upheaval and culture clash. . . . Cotkin's exposition is lucid, his generalizations are largely convincing, and his incorporation of recent scholarship is admirable. (The Historian)
Reluctant Modernism is an elegant, timely synthesis. The study is a gift to historians and students, uniquely probing the minds of male and female intellectuals in the period and illuminating major changes in post-Darwinian American culture. (Sarah Elbert, SUNY Binghamton)
About the Author
George Cotkin is professor of history at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
American Thought and Culture as Americans Emerged from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
By Eclectic Reader
Whether you are a history buff or a historical fiction writer, if you want to get a sense of the state of science, evolution, philosophy, religion, women, anthropology, racism, and an emerging consumer culture in America as the Gilded Age shifted to The Progressive Era, this is a terrific resource. Well-written and interesting, the book offers extensive and invaluable reference notes for each chapter, a bibliographic essay, and index. If you have access to academic library holdings, the sources referenced in the chapter were extremely helpful in further research of these specific topics as they relate to the time period.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
An Uneven Intellectual History of the American Fin de Siecle
By A Certain Bibliophile
This volume, the fourth in the Twayne Modern American Thought and Culture series edited by Lewis Perry and Howard Brick, looks at American intellectual history from 1880-1900. Cotkin covers this ground adeptly and even-handedly, from the pervasive influence of Darwinism on practically every area of human endeavor of the time to the ambiguous place of the woman in intellectual life. The book has its weak points, which I will mention at the end.
The first part of the book is the best and offers some of the clearest insights, though Cotkin never really does get to the heart of the matter in attempting to define what modernism actually is for him. He uses the metaphor of a "tangled bank" - the same one that Darwin used in another context to describe nature. The themes are familiar ones: how our subjects are continually buffeted to and fro between moribund Victorianism and the new, ambiguous, questioning modernism. Cotkin does a superb job of detailing how far-reaching are the ideas of progress, often espoused in the guise of Darwinism. Even the leading liberal religious thinkers of the time - Henry Ward Beecher, Newman Smyth, Octavius Brooks Frothingham - co-opted the idea of progress to create a theology that ministered to the particularly Victorian (not modern) worldview. Former orthodoxy started to become laced with aspects of rationalism, but not necessarily for the scientific pretense it provided; in fact, more often than not, this aspect of religious thought devolved into a calming anodyne for the complacent middle class, an appeal to their fetishization of progress. He covers Pragmatism, that fresh American philosophical tradition, very well, including how its professionalization also led to the development of psychology as its own academic discipline. Even in the realm of psychology the freedom versus determinism debate comes up again, with William Graham Sumner firmly on the side of passively accepting Nature's laws, while William James suggests there is room for human volition.
In one chapter, Cotkin does a fine job in detailing the perhaps not terribly surprising extent to which racism dominated the fields of academic anthropology and ethnology. Lewis Henry Morgan's work with the Iroquois and John Wesley Powell's involvement with the U.S. Geological Survey are also indicative of the search for parallelism, order, and logic that Cotkin has already illustrated. Na�ve optimism was not relegated to the middle-class, however. As James C. Wellington of Columbian College said, "There is a limitless vista opened (though not an absolutely unlimited one) for the prospective working of better laws, purer justice, wiser economics, richer science, and higher morality." By the end of the century, as the influence of Franz Boas grew, anthropology began to slowly slough off its former assumptions and found that "the contextual understanding of culture ... was complex and inexact."
The second half of the book provides information that is just as interesting, but much more derivative. I was introduced to some new names - Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Kasebier - but the background story has been told much more effectively elsewhere. In the closing chapters, Cotkin touches on the growth of American consumerism, and gives a few quick and insightful sketches of Stephen Crane, Louis Sullivan, Thorstein Veblen, and Edgar Saltus.
For an undergraduate student who is looking for a quick overview of the reigning ideas of the time, this book is perfectly sufficient. The first half is worth reading all the way through for the interesting undercurrents of rationalism and progress Cotkin develops, but the second half should serve mostly as biographical reference material.
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