United States History - 20th Century - General & Miscellaneous, Democracy & Republicanism, Philosophical Positions & Movements, United States History - General & Miscellaneous, Civilization - History, American Philosophy

Twentieth-Century Multiplicity

Name: Twentieth-Century Multiplicity
Author: Daniel H. Borus
ISBN: 9780742564589

by Borus, Daniel H.

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Overview

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 Borus documents the belief that there were many truths, many beauties, andmany 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 contingencyand 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.

About the Author, Daniel H. Borus

Daniel H. Borus is Associate 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.

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Editorials

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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.