The Age of Reform

I first read Richard Hofstadter as a graduate student in classes where we mostly did what we could to poke holes in his colorful, sweeping histories. But I return to Hofstadter because while his scholarship has never gone away, he is undoubtedly deserving of a moment of reconsideration in the curren......more

america's yomean farmer found dead in a ditch. This is a great, bold theory of the New Deal as a synthesis of rural Populism and urban Progressivism. It's been noted and well taken that there are several blind spots in Hofstadter's analysis here, but even at its worst, this almost Quixotic approach......more

Once again, Richard Hofstadter proves himself to be one of the best illuminators of American political history I've ever read. This book covers mainly populism and progressivism, but it isn't about the movements' actions so much as the ideas, mythologies, and social conflicts that motivated them to......more

I'm too exhausted to explain why I don't entirely endorse this book right at the moment. Suffice it to say that I've long argued that Hofstadter has a pretty strong anti-immigrant bias, and Age of Reform did nothing to change my opinion.......more

It is very easy, in times of anxiety and unrest, to fall back upon shibboleths and tenets that purport to simplify and clarify the world for us, to provide us with a narrative with which we can make sense of it all, to retreat back into clearly demarcated worlds of facts and interpretations that we......more