A Violent Regeneration

A search for American identity after the Civil War led to a surge of machismo and bloodlust.
David Nasaw | June 25, 2009

Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
by Jackson Lears, Harper, 448 pages, $27.99

History is lived forward but written backward. In October of 1929, no one knew that the Great Depression had begun and would last for over a decade. The soldiers who marched off to fight in the Civil War -- and the families and loved ones who saluted their departure -- had no idea of the carnage that would follow. Historians know better but can't let their knowledge of what came next overdetermine the story they tell. Neither can they make believe that the future of that past was an open book. It wasn't. There were options, openings, possibilities, but only one path was taken. The historian's task is to explain why it was that path and not another.

The best historians strike the right balance between the Scylla and Charybdis of inevitability and randomness. As Jackson Lears demonstrates again in his latest book, Rebirth of a Nation, he is one of the best, certainly of his (and my) generation of historians. His new book is a work of synthesis, an attempt to tell the story of "the making of modern America" in the long half century from the end of the Civil War to the end of the Great War. Although the book's subtitle indicates his narrative begins in 1877 -- the year when the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes as president supposedly marked the end of Reconstruction -- Lears ignores that arbitrary, conventional beginning point. "After the Civil War," he tells us, "the entire country was faced with the task of starting over." In the decades to come, the history of the nation and its peoples would be marked by longings for and attempts at rebirth, regeneration, and revitalization.