Overview

"The best essays from America's premier cultural historian Jackson Lears has been hailed as ""America's premier cultural historian,"" the ""dean of American cultural history,"" and ""one of the few pre-eminent historians of our time."" Well known for his elegant, daring scholarship on topics such as antimodernism, advertising, and luck, Lears has also been a critic and essayist whose public-facing writings—published in journals such as the New Republic, The Nation, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books—have explored a variety of subjects and themes, both contemporary and historical, from modern environmentalism to liberal arts education, from the plastics industry to the happiness industry, from Theodore Roosevelt to Seymour Hersh, from Van Wyck Brooks to Anne Applebaum. The essays collected here, written over the course of over forty years, are absorbing reading for anyone interested in American history, culture, or intellectual life, and provide models of an engaged critic at work on topics and figures both high and low. Offering compelling lenses on historical subjects while setting contemporary culture in rich historical perspective, the essays bridge the gap between history and social commentary and afford a sweeping view of the changing intellectual scene from 1977 to the present."

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9780300267143

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Reviews

“Publication of this substantial collection of Jackson Lears’s essays is cause for celebration. Especially among those who share his appreciation for the quirky pockets of dissent that American modernity has never completely brought to heel.”—Robert Westbrook, University of Rochester    “The brilliance of Jackson Lears as a historian and cultural critic is on full display. ‘Off-Modern’ captures his impatience with the pieties of political and intellectual life, his resistance to customary categories of thought, and his hostility to empire and its domestic pathologies.  Penetrating, ready to push against the flow, and deeply humane, Lears' voice is one we need now more than ever.”—Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America: A History “Jackson Lears possesses, in equal proportion, the gifts of an adventurous historian and a social critic. His range is eclectic and entirely unpredictable. No other writer combines in quite this way an appreciation for eccentric originality with a nose for the false, the fake, the seductive, and the meretricious.”—David Bromwich, Yale University   “Whether his subject is imperialism or intellectuals, cranks or consumption, the humanities or the happiness industry, these bracing essays, spanning four decades, illuminate—as only the inimitable Jackson Lears can—what ails American modernity.”—Sarah E. Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America  

Author Information

Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University and the editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review. He lives in western New Jersey. Charlie Riggs is a writer and historian. He lives in Brookline, MA.

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