OUR TIMES

There is in process at the present time one of the most interesting experiments ever attempted in historical writings. Mark Sullivan has once more come forth with a volume which psycho-analyzes in terms of newspaper headlines, once current fads and fancies, forgotten manias, previous eras of the United States. He has written not exactly a history but rather the evolution of a popular mentality. Having begun this peculiar method of examination in "The Turn-Of-A-Century" the first part of that work called in entirely "Our Times", he continues it in the second part, "America Finding Herself."

Mark Sullivan's contribution to historiography is by no means one of merely fictional interest. "Our Times" admittedly is entertaining but its chief value lies not in its entertainment values but as a source. The immediate public for whom Sullivan is narrating the genesis of modern America is a public whose members were in active life when the events which Sullivan records were taking place; they are amused by the book because in a way it is a tablet of personal reminiscences. The younger people of today, however, the people of college age, form the real vanguard of Sullivan's larger public. They hear witness to the success of his experiment, for he has re-created a period of transition for them, a period with which they have had little or no direct contact.

If Sullivan has been in a large measure successful in his aims, those who are young today owe him a debt of gratitude. To have vitalized and humanized any portion of history is to have made possible a greater degree of sympathy on the part of succeeding generations: and with sympathy minimizes bigotry and misunderstanding. No future student of that beefsteak and-whiskey decade which began the present century can afford to miss its powerful exponent Mark Sullivan.