The Living Past

LIFE IN AMERICA (2 vols., 1,076 pp.)--Marshall Davidson--Houghton M/fflf/n ($20).

Marshall Davidson, of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, wanted a new kind of U.S. history book and decided to write it himself. Instead of rechewing the dry bones of political campaigns, Civil War battles and tariff disputes, he went looking for the marrow in the U.S. past: the way Americans really spent their days.

What games did Puritan children like? How did people get along on the Western frontier? What was it like to live in Chicago 100 years ago? With the help of 1,200 pictures and a 250,000-word text, Historian Davidson has answered these questions and many more. His handsome, two-volumed Life in America will delight anybody able to lay out the $20 for it.

Cricket at Dartmouth. Here is the surrender of the British at Yorktown, here a glimpse of covered wagons heading West, a brassy photo of Dodge City's Main Street in the 1870s. A picture of a squalid "Bandit's Roost" in the New York of the 1880s turns up close to a sedate shot of Fifth Avenue lined with fashionable carriages. Among Davidson's other exhibits: Dartmouth students playing cricket in 1793, women prospectors on their way to the Klondike, Coney Island in the 1890s, child labor in a Virginia glass factory in 1911.

The text of Life in America proposes no striking or revolutionary ideas about U.S. history. Author Davidson has been content to follow the familiar trails hacked out by earlier social historians and to fill in his conventional account with homely details. Volume I is concerned mainly with the way Americans have worked, and it covers everything from slave-tended tobacco growing in the colonial South to New England whaling and Detroit assembly lines. Volume II focuses on manners and styles of life: steamboating on the Mississippi, immigrant ways in the big city slums, the exciting new society diversions of the waltz and polka.

To Yoorup for Culture. Author Davidson dips into newspapers, letters, diaries and popular songs for added flavor. Whittling, reported a visiting Englishman, Captain Frederick Marryat, "is a habit, arising from the natural restlessness of the American when he is not employed." The New York Evening Post complained (in 1828) about the new fad of men playing ball in the city: "The annoyance has become absolutely intolerable . . . and ought to be put an end to without delay." A generation later, a teamster who had struck it rich in Nevada passed a verdict on U.S. culture: "Ther arn't no chance for a gentleman to spend his coin in this country, an' so me an' Mrs. Bowers is goin' ter Yoorup."

Life in America is a first-rate piece of social history.

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