William Jennings Bryan: An Uncertain Trumpet

At the time of his death in 1925, William Jennings Bryan was, as Henry Steele Commager wrote, "the most representative American of his time." To understand Bryan is to understand the United States on the cusp of modernity as regionalism declined, national political and economic institutions expanded, and the urban way of life began to eclipse the rural.

Bryan's time, as today, was one of profound transition and tumult in the United States. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth cen...