The mirror of war: American society and the Spanish-American War

The book's six essays probe the social consensus, particularly its reliance on simple limited categories of thought and its trust in elemental, unambiguous moral judgment. They explore equally the faltering of consensus, particularly its inability to incorporate new problems that seem to demand that power be marshaled at the center and extended to the domestic economy and to foreign affairs. Even when most potent, however, the consensus was not one of lock-step; it offered to the various parts of the nation a broad latitude, a generous heterogeneity further increased by its gradual erosion. The following studies, predicted like the consensus itself on the looseness and diversity of nineteenth-century life, attempt to probe an American society caught by war at a time of special tensions. [From the Introduction.]