YOUNG AMERICA

1830-1840, by Prof. Robert E. Riegel. University of Oklahoma Press,1949. pp. xii-436. $5.00.

This is the kind of history I like. As Mr. Dooley says, there is a great deal of history that isn't true because "it ain't like what I see ivry day in Halstead Street." Professor Riegel is Mr. Dooley's man because he has written a book "that'll show me th' people fightin', gettin' dhrunk, makin' love, gettin' married, owin' the grocery man and bein' without hardcoal." There's many a book that "tells you what a country died iv." "But, Hennessy," he pleads, "I'd like to know what it lived iv."

Ranging the period covered by one of the less meritorious volumes of the American Life Series, and the era whose political story received new emphasis in the much acclaimed work of the younger Schlesinger, Professor Riegel really brings the decade of the 1830's to life. His emphasis is on the people themselves, at work, at home, and at play. He has chapters on such topics as The Farm, The Plantation, The Wage Earner, Women, Schools, Reformers, Doctors, Sports and The Arts. Pertinent illustrations and ten or a dozen verses attract and amuse, and instruct.

There is, in fact, a wealth of instruction in the book. Some of it, to be sure, is on the periphery of importance, such as the invention of the "Eccaleobian" or the origin of "Graham Bread," the techniques of Hydropathy or the procedure of the Urscopian. Yet these curiosities but lure the reader to a hundred other developments of the greatest importance—many of them most helpful in understanding our later history.

Twenty years ago the Beards spoke of the Middle Period of American History as "the most changeful, most creative, most spirited epoch between the founding of the colonies and the end of the nineteenth century." Professor Riegel's readable volume affords further striking confirmation of this contention.