Only Yesterday is fresh and entertaining nearly a century after it was written, and the best popular social history of America in the 1920s that I know of. The book’s phraseology isn’t antiquated and its objectivity doesn’t creak. Examines American individualism and the decade that they knew Mah Jong and Mencken. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s 0 likes Like He fell into the pit which is digged for every idealist. Topics range from inventions, books, the League of Nations, crime, tent evangelism, to the American public’s emotional flip-flops of support and rejection, which at publication were recent phases and fads. A social history of the United States during the roaring twenties. Allen has a wonderful eye for detail: dress, hairstyles, morals, slang. Although a fine writer, Bryson cannot compete with such finely-tuned descriptions set down just after the era passed. He sorts through them, giving their why and wherefore as an authentic voice from out of the decade. It is striking how perceptive and prescient Allen is about events. Written in effortless, flowing prose, published in the early 30s with the decade still fresh in the author’s memory (writing as an anti-depressant after his wife and daughter died), re-published for decades, reading it this time was better than my first time as a boy in the 1960s. This is simply the best social history of the Roaring Twenties in the United States I’ve ever read, better than the recently published One Summer by Bill Bryson.
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