Dreamers of the American Dream (Mainstream America) by Holbrook, Stewart H - 1957

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1957. Hardcover. Very Good/No Jacket. light edge wear to boards, some sunning to spine cloth; Stewart Holbrook, who wrote the 2nd in the Mainstream of America Series books, The Age of Moguls, has added a 10th volume with his assembly of personalities who left their mark on America. Visionaries, crackpots, fanatics, dreamers, suffragettes, temperance workers, be-sloganned devotees of betterment in marriage, religion, sex, alcohol, labor relations, penal codes & the treatment of mental illness rub shoulders in a book which encompasses the American dream of Utopia, sobriety & the pursuit of happiness. The shouting & axe-swinging reformer, Carrie Nation, splintered saloon mirrors. At Sherrill, NY, John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Putney Corporation of Perfectionists, fostered "complex marriage"--an apt description, since fidelity & exclusiveness in matrimony were frowned upon. Laura Bridgman, Louis Dwight, Dorothea Dix, Susan B. Anthony & Mrs Stanton fought their mercurial & protracted battles--usually in defense of the rights of others: the deaf, the blind, the insane & the weaker sex. Holbrook's summation of these prophets of Excelsior should interest anyone with even a flickering interest in the history of the country & the evolution of the society we know.--Kirkus