The Search for Order, 1877–1920

An exploration of America's era of reform across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to progress a new societal structure for the nation. Foreword by New York Times–bestselling author David Herbert Donald At the end of the Reconstruction, the spread of science and technology, industrialism, urbanization, immigration, and economic depressions eroded Americans' conventional beliefs in individualism and a divinely ordained social system. In The Search for Order, 1877-1920, Robert H. Wiebe shows how, in subsequent years, during the Progressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Americans sought the organizing principles around which a new viable social order could be constructed in the modern world. This subtle and sophisticated study combines the virtues of historical narrative, sociological analysis, and social criticism.