The Devil in Babylon: Fear of Progress and the Birth of Modern Life

by Allan Levine

What should the modern world look like? Who should be its leaders? And what values should it embrace? We have never wrestled over these questions more than in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Allan Levine's newest book chronicles this wide-ranging emotional and moral conflict by focusing on the people who lived through this turbulent era: an array of personalities traditionalists as well as progressives, the powerful and the powerless who, for better or worse, shaped the contours ofcontemporary North American society. Among them were anarchist Emma Goldman, prohibitionist and creationist William Jennings Bryan, women's rights campaigner Nellie McClung, and gangster Al Capone. Their personal experiences are set against the heated debate about the impact of immigration, the role of women, the conflict between science and religion, the influence of Hollywood, and the changing attitudes about sex issues that preoccupied, and even consumed, North Americans of all classes.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0771052731
• ISBN13: 9780771052736
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Length: 436 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A new twist on an old story...

Although I was already fairly familiar with many of the stories in this book, I was absolutely fascinated by the author's weaving together of American and Canadian history, something I have never encountered before but would now like to see more of. Few Americans (and, I suspect, few historians) realize that many of the things that were going on in the U.S. in the early 20th century were also going on in Canada. I had no idea, for example, that Canada also experimented with prohibition, or that Alberta (like Wyoming, i.e., a western state/province) was the first to grant women the right to vote. The similarities between Chicago and Winnipeg (a city many Americans have probably never even heard of) are intriguing. And who knew that Henry Ford sold hundreds of thousands of Model-T's in Canada in the 1920s (even though it makes sense, given the geographic location of Detroit)? I thought this book offered a refreshing twist on an old story. Furthermore, it is an excellent demonstration of how irrational it can be at times to limit the scope of histories based on national borders.