The Books of My Life: Rebirth of a Nation

Jackson Lears's history of the United States from the end of the Civil War to 1920, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), argues that regeneration, renewal, or revitalisation, was at the heart of Gilded Age and Progressive Era America. In Rebirth of a Nation Lears explores how Protestant conversion and rebirth themes were transformed and secularised into social psychologies associated with starting over. These secularised forms of conversion, argues Lears, gave rise to a notion that White males could be regenerated through violence, war, and imperialism, that White females could be regenerated through reform, that America could be regenerated through a purification of politics and competitive economic competition, and that everyone could be regenerated through order and control.

There was a lot I liked about Lears's book. In particular, I greatly appreciated Lears's contention, a contention I whole heartedly agree with, that Protestantism has been at the heart of American culture and ideology. I appreciated Lears's exploration of how Protestant religious ideologies were secularised into  political, economic, and cultural ideologies that impacted the politics, economics, and culture of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era as a curative to the unfortunate tendency within the contemporary American historical profession to ignore the critical cultural role religion has played in American life over its history.

I highly recommend Lears's Rebirth of a Nation. If I was asked to teach a graduate seminar on the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, Lears's book, along with Alan Tractenberg's The Incorporation of America, would be the first two the books I would have graduate students. Both provide students and those interested in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era an excellent sense of recent important historiographic debates on the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Given its historiographic importance I also recommend Lears's book to anyone interested in a state of the art synthesis of America from the Civil War to the end of World War I. Lears's book is, in my opinion, cultural history at its most enlightening and thought provoking best.