Changing the World : American Progressives in War and Revolution (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)

Rating:
Summary: So Disappointing!
Review: What a wonderful and timely topic! Such frustrating execution! Readers will find some passages and myriad phrases repeated multiple times (compare, e.g., pp. 33 and 171, for an especially egregious example). Readers will find many petty but not insignificant mistakes: the Sixteenth Amendment (not the Seventeenth) authorized the federal income tax (p. 121); John Davis, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1924, was never governor of Ohio (p. 327); Robert Lansing was Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, but not his son-in-law (p. 246), though Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo was; the women in the photo at p. 332 are misidentified in the caption, though this appears to have been an archivist's mistake before it was Dawley's; etc.

All this, of course, is very strange for a book by the author of the distinguished 1976 book, Class and Community. The book arises out of superb historical instincts, and it has some real gems (e.g., the fascinating War Plans White developed by the Army War College to combat domestic revolutions). Too bad the execution is so mixed, and too bad the editors at Princeton University Press seem not to have bothered to do much editing!