Chapter 1 Crisis of the 1890s 1 -- A New Kind of Growth 6 -- Age of Industrialism 19 -- Chapter 2 Prelude to the Twentieth Century 25 -- New Jobs, New Roles 25 -- Weakened Spring of Government 38 -- Politics in the Depression Decade 41 -- Taste of Empire 44 -- Challenge of Change 49 -- Chapter 3 Corporate Revolution 54 -- Great Merger Movement 55 -- Mass Production, Mass Consumption Society 61 -- Changes in Work and the Work Force 64 -- Productivity and Pain in Agriculture 75 -- New Corporate Economy 78 -- Chapter 4 A Changing Society and Culture 80 -- A Growing Nation 81 -- Class and Status in American Society 87 -- Women, the Family, and Sexuality 90 -- Modernism and Institutions: Schools, Hospitals, Places of Worship 102 -- Challenge of the City 110 -- A New Mass Consumption Culture 112 -- Aviation and the Promise of Technology 124 -- Modernism in Thought and Art 127 -- Chapter 5 Progressive Impulse 132 -- Great Light 132 -- Progressives as Interventionists 133 -- Progressive Agenda 140 -- Development of Nationwide Reform 147 -- Voluntarism as a Middle Way 150 -- Reform in the Cities 155 -- Progressivism in the States 158 -- Progressive Impulse 169 -- Chapter 6 Washington Whirligig 172 -- Death of a President 172 -- Theodore Roosevelt: The Warrior as President 173 -- Square Deal, 1901-1909 176 -- Taft versus the Insurgents, 1909-1913 184 -- Woodrow Wilson: The Scholar as Chief Executive 190 -- New Freedom, 1913-1916 193 -- Political Modernization 198 -- Chapter 7 Taking the Flag Overseas 201 -- Road to Interventionism 201 -- Roosevelt's Big-Stick Diplomacy 207 -- Taft's Dollar Diplomacy 211 -- Wilson's Missionary Diplomacy 213 -- World War I: U.S. Neutrality, 1914-1916 217 -- Road to Belligerency, 1916-1917 223 -- Debate over American Entry 229 -- Chapter 8 World War I and the Search for a New World Order, 1917-1920 233 -- America Goes to War 234 -- Mobilizing the Home Front 244 -- Workers and War: Organized Labor, Women, and Minorities 251 -- Victory in France, Defeat in the Soviet Union 256 -- Diplomacy of Peacemaking and the Rejection of the League 262 -- Domestic Discord and Repression 268 -- Chapter 9 Meaning of the Progressive Era 274 -- Interventionist Impulse 275 -- "Modernization" in World Perspective 281 -- Cycles of Reform 282 -- Legacy of the Progressive Era 284 -- Progressive Era and the Nature of Modern America 298.

"John Chambers incorporates into his book the latest scholarship about the social, cultural, political, and economic changes that produced modern America. He illuminates the experiences of blacks, Asians, Latinos, as well other working men and women in the cities and countryside, as they struggled to improve their lives in a transformed economy." "While recognizing a "progressive ethos" - a mixture of idealistic vision and pragmatic reforms that characterized the period - Chambers elaborates the role of civic volunteerism as well as the state in achieving directed social change....