| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming. By Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. xii, 349 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-87154-445-8.)
Since the 1970s advocates of the then "new" social history have produced an impressive assemblage of chiefly quantitative studies of distinct sectors of America—ethnicities, races, genders, occupations, ages, classes, or communities. The dominant focus has been each sector's likelihood of actually cashing in on the alleged American dream. Those historians have promised but only rarely delivered the more comprehensive, socioeconomic ("bottom-up") picture to supplement the ever-popular, great-moments, great-movements, or movers-and-shakers versions of national history. Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern have performed a great service by providing just such a synthesis.	1
As the subtitle of One Nation Divisible suggests, the book frames the nation within a pair of snapshots: what it was and what it is becoming. It is crafted from well-selected secondary sources and demographic data from the beginning and the end of the twentieth century. There is clear, consistent emphasis on the continuity and change in the social background of residents and the challenges to advancement they face. Each section of the book carefully builds a strong case for the many "paradoxes" that Katz and Stern find.	. . .

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