The Stammering Century (New York Review Books Classics)

ISBN: 1590175808

Author: Seldes, Gilbert

Condition: New

Gilbert Seldes, the author of The Stammering Century, writes:This book is not a record of the major events in American history duringthe nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with thecults and manias of that period. Its personages are fanatics, and radicals,and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movementsand figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply abackground in American history for the Prohibitionists and the Pentecostalists;the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censorsand the Fundamentalists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks andpossibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religiousexcitements, and the relation of each of these to the others and to theorderly 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. Seldess 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.