Diana West: Yesterday, classical musical lit the way

Diana West's column (linked above) includes some interesting musical and radio history - but I'm mainly including it here to point to the 'social historian' she cites: Frederick Lewis Allen.

Allen's book Only Yesterday has been called a biography of the 1920s. Originally published in 1931, it is still in print. As of 1957, the print year of the book I have on my desk for reference, it had already gone through 22 printings at Harper & Brothers, had been a Book of the Month club selection (1931), had come out in a Harper College Text edition (three printings, 1932-1935), had come out in something called a Blue Ribbon edition in 1933, a Bantam edition (two printings, 1946 and 1950), a Bantam Giant edition in 1952, and finally (to that point), a Bantam Fifty edition in 1957. I don't know the printing history since then, but a quick check at barnesandnoble.com shows you can pick up a new trade paperback copy for $11.70 (list price $13.00), and there are more than 150 copies available used, including audiobook versions.

From the preface to the Bantam Edition:

This book is an attempt to tell the story of an era in American history: the eleven years between the end of the first world war (on November 11, 1918) and the stock-market panic which culminated on November 13, 1929, hastening and dramatizing the destruction of what had been known as Coolidge (and Hoover) prosperity.

It was written almost immediately afterwards, during 1930 and 1931; and you who read it today will have to make allowances for that fact...

...But a single warning may be in order.

In the original preface I wrote, "One advantage the book will have over most histories: hardly
anyone old enough to read it can fail to remember the entire period with which it deals." That is emphatically no longer true... And therefore I should confess that in the effort to highlight the trends of the nineteen-twenties - and to enliven the book - I illustrated some of these trends with rather extreme, though authentic, examples of odd or excited behavior. These may mislead you....into thinking that everybody must have been a little crazy during the nineteen-twenties. If so, will you please take my word for it that one could gather just such preposterous examples of American behavior today...and that, in short, the period was not conspicuously sillier than any other, but simply silly in somewhat different ways...

Allen wrote other books looking at America, specializing in the time period from about 1900 to 1950.