American Public Life and the Historical Imagination

By applying a variety of critical historical strategies and methodologies to the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American public life, contributors to this volume unearth fascinating chronicles in American history. The alliance of the Anti-Saloon League and the Klu Klux Klan in the early twentieth century, hurricane control as a paradigm of twentieth-century institutional life, Native Americans as historians of the United States, and the difficulties that a legal theorist of the 1930s found in describing the functions of marriage, are just some of the topics covered. These essays explore an enlarged vision of American public life, one that incorporates all the institutions identified with American society, politics, and economy.

Featuring many of the best-known historians of the United States, this splendid collection consists of fresh, first-rate scholarship that advances new arguments in the area of American public history.

Contributors: Frederick E. Hoxie, William J. Novak, James J. Connolly, Hendrik Hartog, J. Matthew Gallman, Wendy Gamber, Allon Gal, Beth LaDow, Charles W. Cheape, Michael Grossberg, Thomas R. Pegram, Raymond Arsenault, and Ellen Fitzpatrick.