First published in 1973, Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, now reissued in a handsome paperbound edition, became a key text of the counterculture, a book to shelve alongside Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Custer Died for Your Sins-and it sometimes reads like a hip product of its time. Examining a collection of several thousand glass plate negatives and historical documents from Jackson County, Wisconsin, he concocted a sprawling treatise on a past that had been willfully forgotten, a brooding rejoinder to Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. In the late 1960s, another desperate time, historian Michael Lesy took a long look at fin-de-siècle America. As the Indian Wars ended and the Gilded Age extended into America's first Imperial Age, social critics such as Mark Twain and William Dean Howells began to examine the dark side of the American dream: violence, poverty, degenerate behavior, suicide, and insanity. For many others, however, the period was a time of economic dislocation, when the gap between city and countryside, rich and poor, grew ever wider. The last decade of the 19th century was, for some Americans, a time when great fortunes were to be made.
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