The Civil War And World War One, By Arnold Gesell, And...

During the years between the Civil War and World War One, the United States exploded into a collision of novel ideas and theories, especially those pertaining to the modern social and policy sciences. The power vacuum that was created during this time of innovation was one that gave birth to works that have changed the course of generations, and in order to prevail, the challenge for each author and each work was to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a sometimes skeptical public. Authors Arnold Gesell, Frederick Winslow Taylor, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman met this challenge head-on. Though the actual messages of each of their works is important, the way that each is presented, the language, structure, and tone that are used in execution are equally, if not more important, than the messages themselves. These literary details become the purposeful and powerful tools used by each author to gain the reader’s subliminal confidence, which gives them the ultimate power of legitimacy. The study of sociology had only begun to achieve validity in the eyes of the public when Arnold L. Gesell published the article titled â€Å"The Village of a Thousand Souls,† an article that is supposed to reveal â€Å"the absolute truth about a real village located in a prosperous farming district in the Middle West† (Gesell 11). The article dresses itself in the garments of a scientific paper; terms are defined, statistics are presented, groups and different factors are labeled and accounted for, and