Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March by Deborah Gray White (review)

Deborah Gray White's Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March offers an exceedingly well written, nuanced, and refreshing look at a decade often overlooked by historians. During the 1990s, a period of relative peace and prosperity, Americans were at a crossroads. "Despite the economic boom that left individuals and the government wealthier than ever," White explains, "Americans were less hopeful than ever" (pp. 7, 8). Jobs sent abroad, increased debt, the growth of prisons, the rising costs of health care, and the burdens imposed by information technology left many feeling lost, confused, and uncertain about the future. In their struggle to assert more authority over what they believed to be the breakdown of their communities and, by extension, the nation, Americans from different groups, and with different causes, marched to make sense of what they understood to be changing definitions of liberty and citizenship.

Lost in the USA resonates with other works that explore the issues, expectations, and coalitions central to American protest, including Lauren Araiza's To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers (Philadelphia, 2014) and Lucy G. Barber's Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (Berkeley, 2002). White's book goes a step beyond the organization of marches and their coverage. Embarking on a digital humanities project using thousands of articles, editorials, and letters in newspapers, White uncovers the voices of the marchers, including their opinions, feelings, and ideas about why they marched. In doing so, she contends that Lost in the USA is a book not about the politics of marches and their leaders but about the marchers themselves. Thematically organized in six chapters and an epilogue, White's work argues that marchers of the 1990s were guided by a "'psychospiritual revolution'" that prompted their efforts "to take individual responsibility for what was missing in their everyday world" (p. 22).

By analyzing the intersections of race, faith, class, gender, and sexuality, White shows how evangelical white middle-class men, Promise Keepers, middle-class black men and women of the Million Man March and the Million Woman March, members of the LGBT community who participated in the Millennium March, and the women of the Million Mom March, despite having different life experiences, were able to organize across their identities to find out where and how they belonged to America. More specifically, each group looked to determine how they could merge their needs and wants with others' to make America work for them. Providing a context for exploring the anxiety that accompanied masculinity in the 1990s, White masterfully shows the importance of history in revealing how marchers approached issues differently based on their respective histories and ironically ended up with similar solutions.

For example, the women of the Promise Keepers and Million Man March carved out a middle ground based on their shared sense of family. Supporting men without endorsing patriarchy or women's inferiority, both groups of women championed the two-parent heterosexual family as the best means for handling a postindustrial era where women increasingly raised children alone. Personal responsibility was a key component for most marchers, and White reminds us that both the Millennium March and the Million Mom March had political orientations that demanded a federal response.

While acknowledging the book's lack of coverage of recent marches, White illuminates the group identity of those people many have heard of but whose motivations for protest are far less familiar. A must-read for advanced students and scholars alike, Lost in the USA provides clear, concise definitions of significant concepts, including globalization and postmodernity, while delivering compelling insights on the origins of the...