Learning To Be Civic: Higher Education and Student Life, 1890-1940

Abstract

All studies of American civic life identify the years between 1890 and 1940 as the high tide of civic engagement: the period in which voluntary associations and other formal organizations, for profit and nonprofit, proliferated rapidly, in which citizens participated in unprecedented numbers (Skocpol, 1999; Putnam, 2000; Putnam & Gamm, 1999; Hall, 1999). A variety of forces and collective experiences have been offered to explain this phenomenon: the unifying and paradoxically civilized impact of war; efforts to overcome the atomizing effects of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization; the enactment of laws facilitating corporate and associational activity; efforts by religious and economic conservative activists to privatize religion and culture.