Book Review

The year 1898 was "one of those rare years," author David Traxel explains, that "changed the course of American history." Aiming at a "portrait," rather than "any overarching theory or analytical approach" that might be construed as an argument or interpretation, Traxel, an independent scholar and biographer of Richard Harding Davis, wants to convey a sense of the openness of events, the role of "luck, contingency, and individual initiative." A theory and an analysis, he writes, "would make decisions and events seem orderly, predictable, and exclusively determined by large impersonal forces." Personal experience rather than impersonal forces is the stuff of the history recounted here. Thus the mode of the book is narrative and descriptive; it tells stories, describes places, and presents voices, drawn chiefly from memoirs, newspaper articles, popular songs, and liberal quotation of Mr. Dooley. The book is more anecdotal than novelistic, a texture of happenings such as war, elections, a world's fair (at Omaha), labor strikes, business consolidations, bad weather, and a bit of scandal. Each occurrence is presented from the perspective of one or more participants, the actors "acting from a sense of personal freedom." It is "their stories" the author wishes to tell and to make of the sundry differences one braided tale of the changed course of American life.

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