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The Leader and the Crowd : Democracy in American Public Discourse, 1880-1941 by Daria Frezza, Martha King (transl.) is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Leader and the Crowd : Democracy in American Public Discourse, 1880-1941 about?

Daria Frezza covers six tumultuous decades of transatlantic history to examine how European theories of mass politics and crowd psychology influenced American social scientists' perception of crowds, mobs, democratic "people," and its leadership. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the development of an urban-industrial mass society and the disordered influx of millions of immigrants required a redefinition of these important categories in American public discourse. Frezza shows how in the Atlantic crossing of ideas American social scientists reelaborated the European theories of crowd psychology and the racial theories then in fashion. Theorists made a sharp distinction between the irrationality of the crowd, including lynchings, and the rationality of the democratic "public." However, this paradigm of a rational Anglo-Saxon male public in opposition to irrational mobs―traditionally considered to be composed of women, children, "savages"―was challenged by the reality of southern lynch mobs made up of white Anglo-Saxons, people who used mob violence as an instrument of subjugation over an allegedly inferior race. After World War I, when the topic of eugenics and immigrat

Who reads The Leader and the Crowd : Democracy in American Public Discourse, 1880-1941?

Author

Daria Frezza, Martha King (transl.)

Publisher

University of Georgia Press Project MUSE

Published

2007

Language

EN

ISBN

9781282553248

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Political Science, Fiction