America was quite a different place one hundred years ago. There are 300 million Americans today. We drive and fly everywhere. We talk on cell phones and chat over the Internet. For the 90 million people living in the United States of 1908, life was slower but the modern age was coming on quickly. Jim Rasenberger recreates the major events of that remarkable yesteryear in his new book America 1908 [LibraryThing / WorldCat]. He describes the year with an unfolding fascination.
Few people had heard of the Wright Brothers or had seen anyone fly when the year began, but reports trickled out of North Carolina and France in the spring and early summer. By August, hour-long public flight demonstrations made headlines around the world. The conquest of the skies changed the world in 1908, but that technological development wasn’t alone. Henry Ford debuted his Model T that year, too. Automobiles, a luxurious novelty of the rich, was suddenly within reach of the middle class pocket book.
Rasenberger writes about these major cultural shifts within the context of other news stories playing out the same year. A strange around-the-world auto race (cars were still novelties) attracted crowds on three continents, two men struggled to reach the North Pole, a very popular president (Theodore Roosevelt) made way for his successor, sixteen American battleships circumnavigated the globe, a string of horrific lynchings erupted in Abraham Lincoln’s home town, and a bonehead play in a contentious baseball game capped the National League pennant race.
Although the book is chronological in structure, it is narrative in delivery. The author unfolds the stories bit by bit as if you were reading them in a succession of quarterly newsmagazines. It’s an effective technique. The only thing lacking is the feel for everyday life. You get small doses of what the average American experienced (the nickelodeon craze, for instance) but the focus is always on the news — not the common life. The year’s news was rich that year, however, and America 1908 is a very good account of those twelve transformative months one century ago.
Thanks for the review. This looks like just the book we need for our 100 years ago project.
wanted to thank you for America 1908…the birth year of my father, the year our firm MacLennan & Bain Insurance was founded & also your book was the resouce for my speech at the Founder’s Day celebration of our Unviersity Club founded in 1908.
Better to have titled this work, “New York, 1908″, so that those of us who thought were going to read about what profound things were happening across America in that year would have known to avoid this book. When I reached page 153, still thinking I would begin soon to read about events and places that had their origins in places other than New York City and found, instead, that I was still in NYC in a heat wave waiting for Robert Peary’s ship to leave port, I accepted that it was time for this book to get dumped in the recycling bin. I realize that the author lives in NYC and that an easy read in the city library provided the grist for this myopic cityscape. How to, once again, inform a New Yorker that the rest of us don’t really care all that much about your city. Or your attempts to pass it off as representative of all of America in 1980.