"Running water. Electricity. Antibiotics. Dentistry. Air conditioning. Democracy. The rule of law. Such things are not only remarkably new inventions in human history, they are all alien to humanity's natural habitat. Here is what is natural: poverty, hunger, violence, tribal hatred, and an early death. If the Garden of Eden existed, it was a slum. Only once in the last 250,000 years did humans lift themselves out of their natural environment of poverty....

Order, planning, and reason--in the depths of the Great Depression, this was what was needed. Kenneth J. Bindas suggests that this is what modernity offered--a way to make sense of the chaos all around. In Modernity and the Great Depression, Bindas offers a new perspective on power of modernism in early twentieth-century America. In the midst of a terrible economic, social, and political crisis, modernism provided an alternative to the response of...

When Europeans arrived in North America, they encountered the Native people. Contrary to stereotype, American Indians were not simply ferocious warriors or peaceable lovers of the land. They were, like all people, an amalgam: charismatic and forward thinking, imaginative and courageous, compassionate and resolute, and, at times, arrogant, vengeful, and reckless. Native peoples valiantly resisted expulsion from their lands and fought the extinction...