Title: Revolt of the Provinces
First published: 1993
Description: Regionalism emerged across America during the 1920s and 1930s as an artistic and intelectual revolt against postwar urban industrialization. Robert Dorman tells the story of this movement through the works and careers of the writers, artists, historians, land-use planners, literary critics, and social scientists who launched it, including such noted figures as Lewis Mumford, Mary Austin, Donald Davidson, Howard Odum, and Mari Sandoz. He establishes regionalism as a nationwide critique of American society, a case study in the formulation of social democratic ideology, and a vital though neglected chapter in American environmental history and thought. From the agrarian South, the desert Southwest, the rural Midwest, the Pacific, Northwest, and New England villages, regionalists looked homeward to the myths, values, and landscapes of their native provinces for answers to the erosion of America's regional fabric by the forces of modernization. They sought to defend and preserve the remnants of diverse and authentic local cultures by formulating a regional framework for the utopian restructuring of industrial American. Dorman contends that regionalism's celebration of African, European, and Native American cultures laid the foundation for our current debate over pluralist democracy.
Subjects: Intellectual life, History, Regionalism, United states, intellectual life, Sociology, United states, history, 20th century
Places: United States
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: E169.1 .D687 1993