American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry

摘要

Historians are often described as falling into one of two camps: "lumpers," who tend to see connections and similarities between phenomena, processes, and periods, and "splitters," who instead tend to focus on discontinuities and dissimilarities. Daniel E. Bender's history of the "age of industry" in America might be described as a paean to lumping-or, put differently, to the value of "historical synthesis" (p. 12). According to Bender, most previous historians of early-twentieth-century industrial change have "eluci- dated the experience of industrial workers" to the neglect of "the larger intellectual and cultural history of industry" (p. 313).