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Title: Me like book
Review: Richard Hostadter is a wonderful historian who paints with broad yet nimble strokes. He knows the details but does not suffocate the reader with them. His forte is grasping the fundamental beliefs and conditions that guide American political and social movements. Here he shows how "liberal" and "conservative" impulses interwined in the reform movements of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. I was especially intrigued with his argument about the myth of the idealized past, and how that myth becomes increasingly stronger even as it moves further away from the reality (take, for example, the image of 1950s small-town America in today's culture). If you believe, as I do, that the era in which we live has strong similarities to the American situation at the last turn of the century, then you will no doubt find this book valuable.
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