Reviews for American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

The average rating for American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-06-10 00:00:00 Santtu Asikainen This book, the second of Stansell's two big popular historical works, details the arrival of late 19th century European modernism in American through the conduit of the Greenwich Village Bohemia that arose between 1890 and 1920. That 30-year scope is a broad outline but we really get into detail from 1910-1919, a period that in turn divides somewhere around 1916, when, as the U.S. got drawn into WWI, all forms of political radicalism got lumped together as "sedition". Stansell can generally be regarded as a feminist historian but doesn't start out declaring that she will focus on women or feminism, rather lets that emerge as she goes along. In an era where women became intellectual equals and the significant figures of the time were often couples who operated as a partnership, you can't really tell the story of the men without the women. Of course, even though for many of the men "...feminism had been a - perhaps *the* - preeminent source of...fresh and true ideas...", when there were children to be taken care of, the women did that in addition to being intellectual equals. In conclusion, she is clear that the accomplishments of the big names (Emma Goldman, Margaret Anderson) and the (to me) lesser known ones (Mabel Dodge, Ida Rauh, Louise Bryant, Neith Boyce and Crystal Eastman) significantly define the era. One thing I note about this time and place is that it is about as far back as you can go and it still feels generally familiar. Having read Malcolm Cowley's two books covering the 1920s and 1930s, I was inclined to fit this into my recent reading as the "prequel", despite the big difference of perspective. Cowley only gets a glance in this book, partly because he arrives at its close in 1919 and promptly dismisses the entire prior generation for its "atmosphere of middleagedness" with "defeats to be concealed."

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-04 00:00:00 Mark C Lawrence I was excited when I first saw this book on my reading list... the title reminded me of a book I read Nights out: Life in cosmopolitan London (which came out after American Moderns). I was expecting a similar book, but set in NY. While the book was very interesting, particularly the section on "The Human Sex," it did not make my favorites' list. I was not expecting a book filled with mini-biographies on individuals and found it difficult at first to keep track of all the characters. I found the individual character's stories to be distracting from the overall influence bohemians as a group had on American culture. However, the book was an intersting piece on society in the late 18th - early 19th century NY (particularly in the area called Greenwhich Village) and how bohemian influences on society contributed to the modernization of America.