Jackson Lears – författare

An illuminating and authoritative history of America in the years between the Civil War and World War I.

One of the best books of 2009: The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“Fascinating. . . . Engaging. . . . Like the best histories, it is also a book that speaks to our own time.” —The New York Times Book Review

In the half-century between the Civil War and World War I, dreams of spiritual, moral, and physical rebirth formed the foundation for the modern United States. Inspired by imperial ambition, presidents and entrepreneurs—from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Andrew Carnegie—helped usher the nation into the modern era, but sometimes the consequences of their actions failed to match the grandeur of their hopes.

Award-winning historian Jackson Lears richly chronicles this momentous period in America—years marked by wrenching social conflict and vigorous political debate—vividly capturing the roles played by a variety of seekers, from Gilded Age mavericks to vaudeville entertainers, and from populist farmers and progressive reformers to avant-garde artists and writers. Illuminating and authoritative, Rebirth of a Nation brilliantly weaves the remarkable story of this crucial epoch into a masterful work of history.

“Dazzling cultural history: smart, provocative, and gripping. It is also a book for our times, historically grounded, hopeful, and filled with humane, just, and peaceful possibilities.” —The Washington Post

“[A] master class in American cultural and intellectual history.” —Sarah E. Igo, The New York Times Book Review“Jackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire. This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus.” —Cornel WestOne of Wired''s best books of 2023A master historian’s retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate American life and the possibilities they offer today.In Animal Spirits, the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the “Poughkeepsie Seer”) and the “New Thought” pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the “god within—rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am."Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors’ “animal spirits,” these vernacular vitalists established an American religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist tradition—permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our understanding of the cosmos.Includes 8 pages of black-and-white images