Calhoun, Charles W., ed. The Human Tradition in America: 1865 to the Present.

• Author: Shackman, Gene
• Position: Book Review

Calhoun, Charles W., ed. The Human Tradition in America: 1865 to the Present. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2003. 354 pp. Cloth, $65; paper, $22.95.

This is the seventeenth installment in The Human Tradition in America series. The series is based on the idea that human history is made up of a mosaic of many people's lives, each of whom makes some contribution to how the human tradition develops. Each volume focuses on one particular period or topic (e.g., urban America, the Gilded Age, labor history), and consists of small biographical essays about people whose lives illustrate or provide insight into that particular era or topic. Most of the biographies in this book are derived from the other Human Tradition books.

This particular book focuses on three themes: the profound diversity of the American experience; the fact that this diversity is based on the "tremendous heterogeneity of the groups that have constituted the nation's population" (p. xii); and, the continuous need to balance liberty and community. The editor writes that the latter two themes became especially complex after 1865 because of many factors, including increasing modernity, the transformation of the American economy due to the Industrial Revolution, increased immigration, and the rise of the United States as a world power.

The book does a good job of showing the diversity of the United States. The biographical essays describe a wide variety of people such as Daisy Bates, a civil-fights leader; the Hara family, a Nisei couple detained in an internment camp during World War II; Walter Reuther, a labor leader; Cesar Chavez, the farm worker organizer; Mary Crow Dog, a participant in the AIM occupation of Wounded Knee; William O. Douglas, a Supreme Court justice and environmentalist; and Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected municipal official (member of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors). Perhaps, though, a few other biographies might have been chosen. For example, the book has only one biography on Hispanics, only one on Asians (Japanese), and no biographies on people with disabilities.

Many of the biographies also focus on liberty. A number of the aforementioned individuals are activists who pursued liberty for a group of people. It is a little more difficult to clearly identify those biographies that focus on community and the need to balance liberty with community. For example, Calhoun writes that the quest for liberty in the United States, "is...