Category: History, Page 28

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  • Marriage and Modernism

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 20th 2020 11:49am EDT

    After spending the last several months researching Modernism, I now have much better insight into some of my older posts on the decline of the American family. The following excerpt comes from Andrew Cherlin’s book The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today: “The newer form of individualism, which Bellah and […]

  • Jews and Early American Modernism

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 19th 2020 6:13pm EDT

    In the crossover in the Liberal Club between Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side in New York in the 1910s, we’re looking at the embryo of the Modern mainstream. Specifically, we are looking at Jewish radicals from the Lower East Side like Emma Goldman, the alienated Anglos from the Midwest like Floyd Dell, Sinclair […]

  • The Liberal Club

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 19th 2020 12:08pm EDT

    Victorian America was controlled by a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. This is arguably the biggest difference between Victorian America and Modern America. Protestantism used to dominate American culture before the rise of the mass media and mass culture in the 1920s. The following excerpt comes from Robert M. Crunden’s book A Brief History of American […]

  • American History Series: Review: Rebellion Against Victorianism

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 18th 2020 1:44pm EDT

    Stanley Coben, Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America Stanley Coben’s book Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America is a brief account of how the Victorian culture of 19th century America broke down in the 1920s and was replaced by the Modern culture of 20th century […]

  • The New York Avant-Garde and Vitalism

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 17th 2020 2:56pm EDT

    Where did America go off the rails? You could make a plausible case for a number of different periods. Was it 1619 when the first black slaves arrived in Virginia? Was it 1776 when Thomas Jefferson inserted the line “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence? Was it 1865 when the North […]

  • The Second Klan and Victorianism

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 16th 2020 10:58am EDT

    Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress. What was the Second Klan about in the 1920s? The following excerpt comes from Stanley Coben’s book Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America: “The early twentieth-century assaults on Victorianism provoked a strong organized defense by fundamentalists, Prohibitionists, and various conservative and patriotic […]

  • Resistance To Modernism In The 1920s

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 15th 2020 11:18pm EDT

    In this video, the Red Scare, Second Klan, Prohibition, Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, nativism and immigration restriction are covered which were all fronts in the culture war. Note: As I learn more about this era, my sympathies are completely with the Victorians. American culture was never made worse by abstinence, modesty, piety, fidelity and sobriety.

  • American History Series: Review: New World Coming

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 15th 2020 1:23pm EDT

    Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America Nathan Miller’s New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America is an excellent, highly readable introduction to the 1920s. I highly recommend it. I’ve had this book for years, but never bothered to read it until I reread Eric […]

  • The Party Is Over

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 14th 2020 4:47pm EDT

    Why is our world so screwed up? In the early 20th century, we went through World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and World War II. The Victorian culture of the 19th century died in this tumultuous crisis period and the Modern culture of the 20th century emerged from the wreckage. The key […]

  • Sigmund Freud, Moderns and the Lost Generation

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 14th 2020 2:05pm EDT

    In the Victorian era, sex was the ultimate taboo. As we have seen, the Victorian generations saw sexuality as “a hidden geyser of animality existing within everyone and capable of erupting with little or no warning at the slightest stimulus.” Nothing posed a greater threat to the Victorian ideal of self-control than human sexuality which […]

  • The New Era, The Modernist Intelligentsia and the Development of Modern Culture

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 13th 2020 12:08pm EDT

    In the 1920s, a bunch of different threads that we have been tracing came together and crystallized as the Modern liberal intelligentsia which replaced the Victorian mainstream. The following excerpt comes from Paul V. Murphy’s book The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s: “By the 1920s, then, intellectuals had witnessed a society […]

  • Gods of the Upper Air

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 13th 2020 2:06am EDT

    Charles King has a new book out called Gods of the Upper Air about Franz Boas and his students and how they changed American anthropology. Note: I haven’t got the chance to read this book yet or Robert Putnam’s new book The Upswing. I’m going to try to read and review both here.

  • Modernists and American Historiography

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 13th 2020 1:54am EDT

    There are few things that I find more aggravating than listening to conservative liberals prattle on about the deracinated civic nationalism of the Founding Fathers. Victorian America was a White, Anglo-Saxon (in culture), Protestant nation with liberal and republican principles. It was not a “Nation of Immigrants” or a “melting pot.” The conservative liberal vision […]

  • H.L. Mencken, Nietzsche and the Culture War

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 11th 2020 5:48pm EDT

    Modernism arrived in the United States in the 1910s. The culture war between Moderns and Victorians began in the 1920s. If we were to go back to the 1920s, we would find that H.L. Mencken was unquestionably the single most important figure in defining the culture war. Who inspired H.L. Mencken’s culture war? The following […]

  • Jazz and Black Politics In the 1920s

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 11th 2020 12:58am EDT

    This is interesting. The following excerpt comes from Stanley Coben’s book Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America: “The Victorian color caste system was challenged most comprehensively during the 1920s by Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois. Despite their sound ideas and vigorous efforts, neither man accomplished much to raise the […]

  • Titans of Industry

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 10th 2020 3:28pm EDT

    Speaking of the Upswing, I have been enjoying this America in Color series from the Smithsonian Channel, which dovetails nicely with what I have been reading about how American capitalism evolved and became slightly less cutthroat between the Gilded Age and the Great Depression. The Rockefeller Sanity Commission, for example, began the campaign that eradicated […]

  • The Upswing

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 10th 2020 2:56pm EDT

    Impeccable timing. I saw Robert Putnam’s new book The Upswing on how America rebuilt its lost social capital which bottomed out in the Gilded Age in the bookstore last night. While I obviously haven’t read the book yet, I am sure Putnam’s book is about what Peter Turchin has described as “Age of Discord I” […]

  • Civilization in the United States

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 9th 2020 2:08pm EDT

    In Civilization in the United States (1921), Harold E. Stearns and the Moderns summed up their indictment of American culture. The following excerpt comes from Nathan Miller’s New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America: “A Harvard graduate and contributor to intellectual journals, the thirty-year-old Stearns was, in the spring of 1921, […]

  • H.L. Mencken, The Scopes Monkey Trial and the Culture War

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 9th 2020 10:58am EDT

    H.L. Mencken was a journalist, an atheist, a libertarian and a Nietzschean. He shared Nietzsche and the Modernists contempt for the masses. No one in the 1920s had a greater negative impact on shaping the values and beliefs of young Losters in college rebelling against their Victorian parents than Mencken. The following excerpt comes from […]

  • The New Era

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 8th 2020 4:04pm EDT

    As I have argued, Modern America emerged in the 1920s. The Victorian consensus on identity, culture and morality began its long term decline in this period when the Losters rebelled against their parents after World War I. The rifts that began to open up in the 1920s were temporarily overshadowed by the mirage of unity […]

  • Late Victorian Women’s Fashion

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 8th 2020 2:25pm EDT

    Queen Victoria died in 1901. Technically, we are looking at women’s fashion in the Edwardian era to put this shift in perspective. King Edward VII died in 1910 and was succeeded by King George V. Victorian culture ended around 1914 at the start of World War I. Women dressed much more modestly before the big […]

  • The New Woman and 1920s Fashion

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 8th 2020 11:56am EDT

    As we have seen, the “New Woman” who smoked Torches of Freedom was a literary creation of Modernism that originated in Henrik Ibsen’s play The Doll House (1879) and was popularized by Henry James in his novels in the late 19th century. In America, the New Woman became known as the Flapper in the 1920s. […]

  • The GOP and Cultural Change

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 7th 2020 11:13am EDT

    I’m struggling to pay attention to the 2020 election. I’ve tuned out and my mind is elsewhere at the moment. I would rather not wade into politics at the height of election season. I am dreading the outcome because of the potential for violence. If my analysis is correct, this country is a tinderbox full […]

  • The Hays Code

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 7th 2020 10:08am EDT

    In the 1920s, millions of Americans began watching Hollywood movies and movie theaters spread across America. Almost as soon as film developed into the preeminent art form of 20th century mass culture, some Americans began to worry that mass entertainment was corrupting morals. The following excerpt comes from Nathan Miller’s New World Coming: The 1920s […]

  • The Thirties

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 6th 2020 4:55pm EDT

    In the previous article, I briefly mentioned how the Great Depression and World War II were a gigantic detour from the logic of the new Modern values which supplanted Victorianism and put down their roots in the Roaring Twenties. The country had to unify, confront and overcome a major economic and international crisis before domestic […]