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Overview
This book is not a record of the major events in American history during
the nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with the
cults and manias of that period. Its personages are fanatics, and radicals,
and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements
and figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply a
background in American history for the Prohibitionists and the Pentecostalists;
the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors
and the Fundamentalists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and
possibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious
excitements, and the relation of each of these to the others and to the
orderly progress of America are the subject.
The subject is of course as timely at the beginning of the twenty-first century as when the book first appeared in 1928. Seldes’s fascinated and often sympathetic accounts of dreamers, rogues, frauds, sectarians, madmen, and geniuses from Jonathan Edwards to the messianic murderer Matthias have established The Stammering Century not only as a lasting contribution to American history but as a classic in its own right.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781590175804 |
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Publisher: | New York Review Books |
Publication date: | 11/06/2012 |
Series: | NYRB Classics Series |
Pages: | 452 |
Sales rank: | 928,973 |
Product dimensions: | 5.34(w) x 7.82(h) x 0.98(d) |
About the Author
Greil Marcus is the author of The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, Lipstick Traces, and other books; with Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America. In recent years he has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, the New School University, and the University of Minnesota. He was born in San Francisco and lives in Oakland.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
A Note on Method xxiii
Part I
I The Stammering Century 3
II A Stormer of Heaven 13
III Times of Refreshing 36
IV Gasper River 51
V The New Eden- 69
VI -And the Old Adam 81
VII Winners of Souls 93
VIII A Messianic Murderer 117
IX The New Soul 133
X The Perfect Communist 157
XI Reformer and Radical 199
XII An Apostle of the Newness 207
XIII Sweetness and Light 227
XIV A Saint 239
XV The Winsome Heart 249
XVI A Moral Hijacker 273
XVII Some Women Reformers 279
Part II
XVIII "The Coming of the Prophets" 295
XIX The Forerunners 299
XX The Business of Prophecy 321
XXL The Good News from Rochester 331
XXII Northbound Horses 348
XXIII The Path to Nothing 366
XXIV Christian Science 376
XXV The Kingdom of God in Chicago 389
XXVI The Complex of Radicalism 402
Sources 412
Index 413