The Big Change
Frederick Lewis Allen was a social historian who was one of the first. Allen is best known for his book Only Yesterday, which pioneered the concept of instant history, or the reconstruction of bygone eras through vivid commentary on news, fashions, rituals, and artefacts that changed the speed and forms of American life. Allen's final and most ambitious work was The Big Change. He tried to chronicle and explain the steady change of American life over the last half-century in it. The Big Change describes a pivotal era in American history and gives an implicit and insightful perspective on what has occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, written during a time of exceptional optimism and wealth.
Allen's central topic is the achievement, in large part, of democracy's promise. Allen wrote in favor of an economic system that had ushered in a new era of well-being for the American people, in contrast to the strand of social critique that regarded America as enfeebled by luxury and conformity. He splits his investigation into three areas. The first, "The Old Order," depicts a turn-of-the-century plutocracy in which the federal government was mostly subordinate to economic interests and the wealth disparity foreshadowed a serious threat of bloodshed. "The Momentum of Change" depicts the different factors that shaped America in the new century: mass manufacturing, the car, the Great Depression and the rise of large government, World War II, and America's emergence as a world power. In this context, Allen demonstrates how the economic system was altered without being damaged, and how social differences gradually narrowed.
"The New America," the last portion, is a positive evaluation of postwar American culture. Allen's study challenges many prevalent views of American society, both foreign and domestic, and puts the country's social issues in context. The Big Change is both a profound and delightfully accessible work of social criticism, as William O'Neill points out in his introduction to this new edition, and a book that gains rather than loses with the passage of time.
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