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New World Coming
The 1920s and the Making of Modern America
Table of Contents
About The Book
The images of the 1920s have been indelibly imprinted on the American imagination: jazz, bootleggers, flappers, talkies, the Model T Ford, Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh's history-making flight over the Atlantic. But it was also the era of the hard-won vote for women, racial injustice, censorship, widespread social conflict, and the birth of organized crime. Chronicling what he views as the most consequential decade of the past century, Nathan Miller—an award-winning journalist and five-time Pulitzer nominee—paints a vivid portrait of the 1920s, focusing on the men and women who shaped that extraordinary time, including, ironically, three of America's most conservative presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.
In the twenties, the American people soared higher and fell lower than they ever had before. As unprecedented economic prosperity and sweeping social change dazzled the public, the sensibilities and restrictions of the nineteenth century vanished, and many of the institutions, ideas, and preoccupations of our own age emerged. With scandal, sex, and crime the lifeblood of the tabloids, the contemporary culture of celebrity and sensationalism took root and journalism became popular entertainment. By discarding Victorian idealism and embracing twentieth-century skepticism, America became, for the first time, thoroughly modernized. There is hardly a dimension of our present world, from government to popular culture, that doesn't trace its roots to the 1920s, and few decades are more intriguing or significant today.
The first comprehensive view of the era since Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's 1931 classic, New World Coming reveals this remarkable age from the vantage point of nearly a century later. It's all here—the images and the icons, the celebrities and the legends—in a book that will resonate with history readers, 1920s aficionados, and Americans everywhere.
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (May 11, 2010)
- Length: 448 pages
- ISBN13: 9781439131046
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Raves and Reviews
James MacGregor Burns Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom The "forgotten 1920s" come alive in this enormously engaging story of the sparkling and diverse personalities who presided over that extraordinary decade, narrated by a journalist who is also a noted historian.
Hugh Downs A narrow slice of history deserving examination in depth is spotlighted by a writer whose style is as engaging as his research is impeccable. Fascinating reading!
Phyllis Lee Levin author of Edith and Woodrow Nathan Miller's portrait of the 1920s is all-encompassing. Vast in breadth, unique in vivid detail, New World Coming is an entirely compelling story of a tantalizing era in American history.
James M. Perry author of Touched with Fire: Five Presidents and the Civil War Battles That Made Them Nathan Miller's anecdotes are so telling and his observations so shrewd that you begin to believe you are there with him in this rollicking account of a misunderstood decade that produced the greatest collection of characters, con men, and geniuses in American history.
Gary Gerstle author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century With vivid portraits, sparkling prose, and a zest for his subject, Nathan Miller has once again made a key era of America's past come to life. Presidents and anarchists, writers and jazzmen, celebrities and crooks, Klansmen and feminists, and many others all burst onto Miller's historical stage with stories that are fresh, nuanced, and compelling. This is history as it should be written.
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