The ten essays in this volume deal with the debates and conflicts about modernity in a period
of American history when the tensions and strains caused by seemingly unrestrained change and
the reactions to it were particularly severe and tangible. Partly concentrating on the margins
or dark underworlds of modernity such as racism and violence partly focusing on the allegedly
unlimited space to negotiate and create social order from scratch the contributions to this
volume show that and discuss why modernity was an issue in contemporary United States which
seemed to have been even more hotly contested than in Europe at the same time albeit sometimes
in terms of Americanism rather than modernism . In this book European scholars of the United
States apply variations on the transnational discourse on modernity to unexpected dimensions of
U.S. history making this volume a fascinating example of the present-day enterprise of
internationalizing American studies.
