A Fierce Discontent, Michael McGerr
A Fierce Discontent, Michael McGerr
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A Fierce Discontent
The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920

Author: Michael McGerr

Narrator: Joe Barrett

Unabridged: 13 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/13/2018


Synopsis

The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs, yet the progressive movement collapsed as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare.

Michael McGerr argues the expectations raised by the progressives' utopian hopes have nagged at us ever since. Our current, less-than-epic politics must inevitably disappoint a nation that once thought in epic terms. The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and now the war on terrorism have each entailed ambitious plans for America. But the failure of the progressive movement set boundaries around the aspirations of all of these efforts. None of them was as ambitious, as openly determined to transform people and create utopia, as the progressive movement. We have been forced to think modestly ever since that age of bold reform. For all of us, right, center, and left, the age of "fierce discontent" is long over.

About Michael McGerr

Michael McGerr is Paul V. McNutt Professor of History at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of several books on modern American political history and has won numerous teaching awards.


Reviews

We live in a politically disappointing time. No matter what our politics, the start of the twenty-first century is not what we hoped it would be. … For the handful of American radicals, the promise of the “Movement” of the 1960s is long gone: corporate America still stands powerful and the American......more

Goodreads review by Jeff

McGerr writes a sweeping history of the progressive movement 1870 - 1920. It was all very interesting, but it was hard to understand how he could avoid William Jennings Bryan and the multiple religious movements of the time. (I picked up the McGerr's book in order to get a different perspective on B......more

Goodreads review by Greg

A masterfully written work covering one of the most important, vital, and divisive periods in United States history. What I most admired about Professor McGerr’s approach was how extensively he used first-person information about specific people to flesh out how they experienced the many problems, as......more