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Tom Lutz's American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History is an entertaining book. It is wide ranging and eclectic, just the sort of critical book that is flourishing in the early 90s—an examination of various cultural materials. But the book has serious flaws that make it, to my mind, untrustworthy.
The two most prevalent flaws are, first, an unclear focus and, second, scholarship that is at points suspect, relying on the kinds of sweeping generalizations that may be permissible in popular culture or even the undergraduate classroom, but not in serious criticism. The problem of focus arises in the opening chapter. In justifying his choice of 1903 as the subject of his book, Lutz says, “A very good argument could be made, in fact, despite Virginia Woolf's assertion that the modern world began one day in 1911, that the modern world began some day in 1903” (p. 18; italics added). Then, after listing several discoveries and events of 1903, Lutz beats a hasty retreat: “While I do not argue that 1903 represents the actual threshold of modernity, in may ways it is the center of a series of changes from what we can generally and reductively call Victorian culture to that which we term modernity” (p. 18; italics added). The list, by the way, is not reliable. Its claim that Einstein wrote his first professional paper in 1903 is contradicted by the following statement in Banesh Hoffmann's (1972) biography, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel: “By 1902 Einstein had completed his third scientific paper, which, like his earlier