Forty years on, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American
Culture, 1880– 1920 retains all of its original power to mesmerize, provoke, and inspire.
Hailed as a work of stunning originality, conceptual force, and literary achievement,
it endures as one of those rare books that is evergreen in moral urgency and political
relevance. It is, at once, retrospective and prospective. No Place of Grace gives readers
a window onto the turn- of- the- twentieth- century transformation of the United States
into a modern, consumer, therapeutic society, while also providing prescient insights
into the cultural developments of the late twentieth century. To call it a “landmark” in
historical scholarship is accurate, insofar as it reoriented entire fi elds of inquiry. But
it is also insuffi cient, as that term might imply that the book did its work and then
passed into obsolescence. The life course of No Place of Grace is not yet complete; its
history is still in the making.
Consider the United States in 1981. Ronald Reagan took the oath of offi ce and
quickly implemented the aggressive deregulation, privatization, and militarization that
would come to defi ne his eight- year reign. It was a year of great technological feats:
the fi rst “test tube” baby, the fi rst space shuttle, and the sale of IBM’s fi rst personal
computer to consumers. Some events overseas, like the attempted assassination of
Pope John Paul II, the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, and Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Times of London, show why the word “globalization”
was starting to gain traction— and concern— among American commentators. Music videos were still in their infancy, and radio stations were still prime real estate for
popular music, with Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Rick James’s “Super Freak”
topping the charts. The movie Arthur charmed American audiences with the story of a
drunken, ne’er- do- well billionaire who bumbles his way to retaining his vast, unearned
wealth. And there was a growing interest in ever- bigger houses (“McMansions”) and
ever- thinner women, with books like Judy Mazel’s The Beverly Hills Diet and Richard
Simmons’s Never- Say- Diet Book topping the nonfi ction charts.