Word: plumbings
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...limits on Plumb's approach are obvious, though, from this collection of essays written over a span of almost ten years. He makes an effort to place the hippies in context, and it is a very restrained and civilized approach--placing them in historical perspective, giving them roots understandable to outsiders and making them less frightening for being so understandable. But only six years afterwards even his concern with the movement seems dated, and datedness is a particularly unfortunate failing in an essay that puts its subject in a historical context spanning six centuries...
...WEAKEST essay in his book, Plumb comments on Detroit and modern American cities. It is evidently a subject he is remarkably ignorant of, and his points--though they may be perceptive--are generally tangential to the main problems which face American urban culture...
...Plumb is on much more familiar ground most of the time, and the diversity of topics he can discuss knowledgably is astounding. The essay on the British response to the American Revolution provides an unusual viewpoint on an often-studied subject. Plumb also writes with authority on clothes, riots and other historical things common to all times but taking a different coloration in each...
...PLUMB REMAINS ON familiar grounds not only in the sense that he knows his subjects well, but also in the sense that they are topics sheltered by an ideological framework already well-explored by scholars like him. He stands before a divide, and seems aware of that. When he writes of trends in modern society, or outbursts of energy in modern times, he recognizes that they represent a breakdown of something and that the principle reason that such trends and outbursts have not produced a radically different order yet is that they posses no underlying ideology. The absence of this...
Then he seems like one of the final mature specimens of a soon to start decaying profession. With or without a new ideology it is soon going to be impossible to do Plumb's sort of scholarship. Historians may repeat his efforts in increasingly pallid imitations, or they may strike off in a new direction under the cover of a revitalized ideology, but they will hardly reproduce Plumb's efforts. Liberal individualism has lost its cutting edge as an intellectual doctrine...