The Stammering Century

Gilbert Seldes, the author of The Stammering Century, writes:
    

This book is not a record of the major events in Ameri­can history during 
    the nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with the 
    cults & manias of that period. Its personages are fanatics, & radicals, 
    & mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements 
    & figures with the primary forces of the century, & to supply a 
    background in American history for the Prohibitionists & the Pente­costalists; 
    the diet-faddists & the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors 
    & the Fundamen­talists; the free-lovers & eugenists; the cranks & 
    possibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious 
    excitements, & the relation of each of these to the others & to the 
    orderly progress of America are the subject.

The subject is of course as timely at the beginning of the twenty-first century as when the book first appeared in 1928. Seldes’s fascinated and often sympathetic accounts of dreamers, rogues, frauds, sectarians, madmen, & geniuses from Jonathan Edwards to the messianic murderer Matthias have established The Stammering Century not only as a lasting contribution to American history but as a classic in its own right.