ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The life of an individual is in many respects like a child's dissected map, observed noted nineteenth century doctor and author Oliver Wendell Holmes, and only the passage of time enables the pieces to be brought together to form properly connected whole. Holmes was over ninety when he finally retired, and his ninetieth birthday was marked by a coast-to-coast radio broadcast, still a technological marvel in 1931, but one unimaginable in the year of his birth when the nation's first telegraph message was still three years away. Holmes' long life, can serve as a lens that focuses, or perhaps more accurately a kaleidoscope that reflects and refracts, through its various shifting shapes and shades, the tremendous social, legal, and economic upheavals of nearly a century of America's history, from Antebellum Era through the First World War and into the New Deal years.