"This volume will become the indispensable work to understand Jane Addams and Hull-House.--Allen F. Davis, author of American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams "What a gift of scholarship Mary Lynn Bryan has created in this volume! It is breathtaking in its depth and detail. Bryan's decades of work have been crucial in returning Jane Addams to her rightful place to be recognized as one of the greatest Americans. In this exciting volume, readers meet Addams as she begins her most important life projects: the founding of Hull-House; popularizing pragmatic democracy in a changing world; and her work for peace and international understanding. With decades of knowledgeable and meticulous scholarship, Bryan has selected writings that illuminate Addams' path from an idealistic, but not naive, young woman facing the great challenges of Chicago and America at the end of the nineteenth century, to the influential and beloved reformer, policy maker, and international social activist. Addams contemporaries believed her to be the greatest American woman of her time, but this volume reveals a far more complex story than one of individualism heroism. While Addams accomplished great things through her own determination, dedication, intelligence, and belief in the value of all peoples, we learn in this volume that she did not achieve great things alone.
Far from it, hundreds of women and men worked directly with Addams and supported her vision for a new American society that could truly begin to fulfill its promises of equality, opportunity, and inclusion. Through the selection of crucial writings of the period, and meticulous, detailed scholarship, Bryan opens up the world of Chicago and Progressive activism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This volume will be a reference source for decades to come for those wanting to learn about the people and events of the Progressive period, Chicago, philanthropy, social work, the history of peace, and many other topics."--Wendy E. Chmielewski, coeditor of Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy.