“Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s”, 2019-06-24 (; backlinks; similar):
Last week’s post, “If You Were to Write a History of 21st Century America, What Would It Look Like?”, asked what a 21st century version of Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s might look like. Here is how I described the book in that post:
There are many things to love about this book. Allen wrote his history of the 1920’s in a jaunty, breezy style. When you pick his book up it is hard to put it down. Allen’s tone is fair, his judgements sharp, and prose delectably entertaining. The most notable thing about this history of the 1920s, however, is its publication date: Allen wrote the book in 1930. He saw it published in 1931.
I often wish Allen had more imitators. Allen’s book shines as a social history. The genius of writing such a history directly after the events took place is that the historian can narrate not just what happened in a period, but what it felt like to live through it. Names have not receded into history; the little things of daily existence are still remembered, and often still in use. Judgements of past events have not been too clouded by the downstream effects they had three or four decades down the line. There is an immediacy to Only Yesterday that I have never found in any other work of history (though I have found it in several works of fiction).
While Allen gives due coverage to economic and political affairs (the League of Nations debates, the Teapot Dome scandal, and the crash of ’29 each get their own chapter length narrations), the majority of Allen’s book is what we would today call “social history”. Allen spends about equal time describing the fads for crossword puzzles and mahjong (yes, you read that last one right) as he does the entire administration of Calvin Coolidge…