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Only Yesterday : An Informal History of the…
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Only Yesterday : An Informal History of the 1920's (1931)

por Frederick Lewis Allen

MiembrosReseñasPopularidadValoración promediaMenciones
1,1932716,456 (4.1)63
Jazz, flappers, flasks, rumbleseats, and raccoon coats; Mah Jong, crossword puzzles, marathon dancers, and flagpole sitters; Red Grange, Rudolph Valentino, and Lucky Lindy. These were the catch words of the roaring, irrepressible '20's. But so were the Boston Police Strike, the K.K.K., women's suffrage, Sigmund Freud, Sacco and Vanzetti, Teapot Dome, Black Tuesday. In this span between armistice and depression, Americans were kicking up their heels, but they were also bringing about major changes in the social and political structure of their country. Only Yesterday is a fond, witty, penetrating biography of this restless decade-a delightful reminiscence for those who can remember, a fascinating firsthand look for those who've only heard.… (más)
Miembro:SaintSunniva
Título:Only Yesterday : An Informal History of the 1920's
Autores:Frederick Lewis Allen
Información:Perennial Library, Harper & Row, soft cover, indexed, 312 pages
Colecciones:Tu biblioteca
Valoración:
Etiquetas:USA History, Originally published 1931, 20th Century

Información de la obra

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s por Frederick Lewis Allen (1931)

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» Ver también 63 menciones

Mostrando 1-5 de 27 (siguiente | mostrar todos)
A wonderful book with a POV that is exciting to this day. I cannot throw away because I will reference it again, even though one corner has been chewed away. ( )
1 vota chiatdaynight | Jan 27, 2023 |
A lively and intriguing book. I knew tidbits about the 1920s—flappers, Al Capone, Lindbergh—but this puts it all together in a meaningful narrative. Dramatic, too, especially the full chapter on the Big Bull Market of 1928 and 1929, when we all know what happens on October 29, 1929.

I kept making connections while reading. At one point, he was describing the major changes in literature, and I realized that this had to line up with when photographers broke with pictorialism and went to straight photography. Yep, Ansel Adams left behind pictorialism in 1922, Weston in 1923, and the Group f.64 exhibit in 1931 displayed the work done during the decade.

The acknowledgments are a reminder that the author lived the decade he's writing about. His account of Woodrow Wilson at the end of his life comes from visiting the man in 1923. His source for the founding of Simon & Schuster is William F. Simon. And so on. ( )
1 vota wunder | Feb 3, 2022 |
Lessons That Go Unheeded

History teaches many lessons but people are bad pupils. Not just people today, but people throughout history have ignored the lessons taught by events preceding them. Consequently, we repeat mistakes over and over again. Those new to Only Yesterday will only have to read a few chapters to see how true these statements are, because the parallels between the 1920s and current times are numerous. Errors made then are still being made today. Read it for yourself to see the truth in this.

Only Yesterday is a contemporaneous history published two years after the 1929 stock market crash, as well as shortly after the Florida Land Bubble bust that began in 1925 (and is argued to be the precipitating cause of the Great Depression by Christopher Knowlton in his recent book, Bubble in the Sun). Frederick Lewis Allen worked as a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, later, in 1941, assuming the position of editor-in-chief. Readers will enjoy his breezy and often tongue-in-cheek style, making this anything but a dry trudge.

Allen covers all the highlights of the years 1919 through 1929, among them the incapacitated years of Woodrow Wilson, the scandal-plagued presidency of Warren G. Harding, the Red Scare spearheaded by AG Mitchell Palmer, the complacent and laissez-faire presidency of Calvin Coolidge, the disaster that was Prohibition, the rise of organized crime that features Al Capone, the rising popularity of spectator sports starring Tunney, Ruth, and others, the adoption of more liberal mores, the books and intellectual arguments of the times, and the financials of the day, among them the above mentioned Florida Land Bubble, the plight of American farmers, intermingling of business and religion, margin buying, unregulated mutual trusts, boosterism, and other like factors resulting in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Readers cannot help but be struck by the similarities, especially in government and business, to what we are experiencing today.

To emphasize this, readers will find much that rings true in this brief quote from the Red Scare pages: “There is a certain grim humor in the fact that what Mr. Palmer did during the next three months was done by him as the chief legal officer of an Administration which had come into power to bring about the New Freedom.” Palmer-ism burned hot in America for a time with some pretty terrible consequences, as this passage reveals: “The intolerance of those days took many forms. Almost inevitably it took the form of an ugly flare-up of feeling against the Negro, the Jew, and the Roman Catholic. The notions of group loyalty and of hatred, expanded during war-time and then suddenly denied their intended expression, found a perverted release in the persecution not only of supposed radicals, but also of other elements which to the dominant American group—the white Protestants—seemed alien or ‘un-American.’” Yes, it is as if we are gazing into a mirror and seeing ourselves.

So, here’s a book of its times that speaks as truly of our own, with lessons for us all. Americans should spend a couple of hours with it, and maybe, hopefully, draw some lesson from it.

( )
1 vota write-review | Nov 4, 2021 |
Lessons That Go Unheeded

History teaches many lessons but people are bad pupils. Not just people today, but people throughout history have ignored the lessons taught by events preceding them. Consequently, we repeat mistakes over and over again. Those new to Only Yesterday will only have to read a few chapters to see how true these statements are, because the parallels between the 1920s and current times are numerous. Errors made then are still being made today. Read it for yourself to see the truth in this.

Only Yesterday is a contemporaneous history published two years after the 1929 stock market crash, as well as shortly after the Florida Land Bubble bust that began in 1925 (and is argued to be the precipitating cause of the Great Depression by Christopher Knowlton in his recent book, Bubble in the Sun). Frederick Lewis Allen worked as a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, later, in 1941, assuming the position of editor-in-chief. Readers will enjoy his breezy and often tongue-in-cheek style, making this anything but a dry trudge.

Allen covers all the highlights of the years 1919 through 1929, among them the incapacitated years of Woodrow Wilson, the scandal-plagued presidency of Warren G. Harding, the Red Scare spearheaded by AG Mitchell Palmer, the complacent and laissez-faire presidency of Calvin Coolidge, the disaster that was Prohibition, the rise of organized crime that features Al Capone, the rising popularity of spectator sports starring Tunney, Ruth, and others, the adoption of more liberal mores, the books and intellectual arguments of the times, and the financials of the day, among them the above mentioned Florida Land Bubble, the plight of American farmers, intermingling of business and religion, margin buying, unregulated mutual trusts, boosterism, and other like factors resulting in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Readers cannot help but be struck by the similarities, especially in government and business, to what we are experiencing today.

To emphasize this, readers will find much that rings true in this brief quote from the Red Scare pages: “There is a certain grim humor in the fact that what Mr. Palmer did during the next three months was done by him as the chief legal officer of an Administration which had come into power to bring about the New Freedom.” Palmer-ism burned hot in America for a time with some pretty terrible consequences, as this passage reveals: “The intolerance of those days took many forms. Almost inevitably it took the form of an ugly flare-up of feeling against the Negro, the Jew, and the Roman Catholic. The notions of group loyalty and of hatred, expanded during war-time and then suddenly denied their intended expression, found a perverted release in the persecution not only of supposed radicals, but also of other elements which to the dominant American group—the white Protestants—seemed alien or ‘un-American.’” Yes, it is as if we are gazing into a mirror and seeing ourselves.

So, here’s a book of its times that speaks as truly of our own, with lessons for us all. Americans should spend a couple of hours with it, and maybe, hopefully, draw some lesson from it.

( )
  write-review | Nov 4, 2021 |
An easy and entertaining read, this book by Fred Allen was written in 1930 to reflect on the 20’s and how life in the US changed during that decade.
Fascinating in its immediacy, this book has only aged and dated a little. It was both reassuring (most of this has happened before) and depressing (have we learned nothing in a hundred years?). A lot of focus is, of course on the enormous financial bubble of the late twenties and its ultimate collapse. What the book lacks in mature, studied analysis is more than compensated for by the feeling that the reader is right there, watching events unfold.
Allen writes engagingly. This book is highly recommended
. ( )
1 vota Matke | Aug 8, 2021 |
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Nombre del autorRolTipo de autor¿Obra?Estado
Frederick Lewis Allenautor principaltodas las edicionescalculado
Foster, Guyautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
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To the memory of D. P. A.
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When Frederick Lewis Allen's fascinating social history of America in the 1920's was first published in 1931, the twenties were inded Only Yesterday. (Foreword by Roy R. Neuberger, June 1997)
If time were suddenly to turn back to the earliest days of the Postwar Decade, and you were to look about you, what would seem strange to you? since 1919 the circumstances of American life have been transformed--yes, but exactly how?
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Something spiritual had gone out of the churches--a sense of certainty that theirs was the way to salvation. Religion was furiously discussed [...] yet all this discussion was itself a sign that for millions of people religion had become a debatable subject instead of being accepted without question among the traditions of the community. (Chap. 8 [4])
If church attendance declined, it was perhaps because, as Walter Lippman put it, people were not so certain that they were going to meet God when they went to church. If the minister's prestige declined, it was in many cases because he had lost his one-time conviction that he had a definite and authoritative mission. The Reverend Charles Stelzle, a shrewd observer of religious conditions, spoke bluntly in an article in the World's Work: the church, he said, was declining largely because "those who are identified with it do not actually believe in it." Mr. Stelzle told of asking groups of Protestant ministers what there was in their church programs which would prompt them, if they were outsiders, to say, "That is great; that is worth lining up for," and of receiving in no case an immediate answer which satisfied even the answerer himself. In the congregations, and especially among the younger men and women, there was an undeniable weakening of loyalty to the church and an undeniable vagueness as to what it had to offer them [...]. (Chap. 8 [4])
Of all the sciences it was the youngest and least scientific which most captivated the general public and had the most disintegrating effect upon religious faith. Psychology was king. Freud, Adler, Jung, and Watson has their tens of thousands of votaries; intelligence-testers invaded the schools in quest of I.Q.s; psychiatrists were installed in business houses to hire and fire employees and determine advertising policies; an one had only to read the newspapers to be told with complete assurance that psychology held the key to the problems of waywardness, divorce, and crime. (Chap. 8 [4])
Those who believed in the letter of the Bible and refused to accept any teaching, even of science, which seemed to conflict with it, bean in 1921 to call themselves Fundamentalists. The Modernists (or Liberals), on the othe hand, tried to reconcile their beliefs with scientific thought: to throw overboard what was out of date, to retain what was essential and intellectually respectable, and generally to mediate between Christianity and the skeptical spirit of the age. (Chap. 8 [4])
The Modernists had the Zeitgeist on their side, but they were not united. Their interpretations of God -- as the first cause, as absolute energy, as idealized reality, as a righteous will working in creation, as the ideal and goal toward which all that is highest and best is moving -- were confusingly various and ambiguous. Some of these interpretations offered little to satisfy the worshiper; one New England clergyman said that when he thought of God he thought of "a sort of oblong blur." And the Modernists threw overboard so many doctrines in which the bulk of American Protestants had grown up believing (such as the Virgin birth, the resurrection of the body, and the Atonement) that they seemed to many to have no religious cargo left except a nebulous faith, a general benevolence, and a disposition to assure everyone that he was really as just as religion as they. Gone for them, as Walter Lippman said, was "that deep, compulsive, organic faith in an external fact which is the essence of religion for all but that very small minority who can live within themselves in mystical communion or by the power of their understanding." (Chap. 8 [4])
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Complete edition of this work; it was also published in two volumes by Pelican Books in 1938. Do not mix volumes 1 or 2 with this complete work.
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Jazz, flappers, flasks, rumbleseats, and raccoon coats; Mah Jong, crossword puzzles, marathon dancers, and flagpole sitters; Red Grange, Rudolph Valentino, and Lucky Lindy. These were the catch words of the roaring, irrepressible '20's. But so were the Boston Police Strike, the K.K.K., women's suffrage, Sigmund Freud, Sacco and Vanzetti, Teapot Dome, Black Tuesday. In this span between armistice and depression, Americans were kicking up their heels, but they were also bringing about major changes in the social and political structure of their country. Only Yesterday is a fond, witty, penetrating biography of this restless decade-a delightful reminiscence for those who can remember, a fascinating firsthand look for those who've only heard.

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