Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians

“The brilliance of Jackson Lears as a historian and cultural critic is on full display. Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians captures his impatience with the pieties of political and intellectual life, his resistance to customary categories of thought, and his hostility to empire and its domestic pathologies. Penetrating, ready to push against the flow, and deeply humane, Lears’ voice is one we need now more than ever.”—Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America: A History

“Jackson Lears possesses, in equal proportion, the gifts of an adventurous historian and a social critic. His range is eclectic and entirely unpredictable. No other writer combines in quite this way an appreciation for eccentric originality with a nose for the false, the fake, the seductive, and the meretricious.”—David Bromwich, Yale University

“Whether his subject is imperialism or intellectuals, cranks or consumption, the humanities or the happiness industry, these bracing essays, spanning four decades, illuminate—as only the inimitable Jackson Lears can—what ails American modernity.”—Sarah E. Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America

“Publication of this substantial collection of Jackson Lears’s essays is cause for celebration. Especially among those who share his appreciation for the quirky pockets of dissent that American modernity has never completely brought to heel.”—Robert Westbrook, University of Rochester