In 2001, forty-five Vanderbilt University students, doubtless hoping for a film-and-literature course, enrolled in my “Twentieth-Century American Blockbusters.”

These blockbusters were books, not movies, I explained that hot, late August day. The titles, I emphasized, deserved the name “blockbuster” according to the dictionary definition of experience so overwhelmingly forceful that it radically changes people’s minds. The books appearing on the reading list, I pointed out, had changed public opinion on a range of issues. They included Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, both engines of the nascent environmental and feminist movements in the later twentieth century....

In the early 1980s, I agreed to edit a paperback reprint of Edward Bellamy’s time-travel romance Looking Backward—2000–1883 (1887), published in the era known as America’s Gilded Age. A blockbuster novel of its own day, based on a love story and studded with technological wonders, Looking Backward called attention to U.S. sociopolitical problems crying for correction. It summoned help from organized citizen groups, business leaders, and public officials. Wildly popular among middle-class American readers in the late nineteenth century, Looking Backward is credited with contributing to the political activism of the muckraking movement of the early twentieth century....

The muckrakers grew up in a world identified by two titles: The Gilded Age (1873) and The Robber Barons (1934).* One signifies a ruling aristocracy based on theft and plunder. The other profiles an entire era’s cheap glossy reality—its gilding—which belied its obsession with gold and the desperation of those without it. The era’s subheadings have become a standard textbook trio: urbanization, industrialization, and immigration—all vivified by a montage of images which appear routinely in high-school history texts, in the pages of gift-book editions, and on TV.

I can close my eyes and see them—the dark...

In the fall of 2001, the mail brought a particularly nice surprise: a copy of Book magazine, featuring a cover story on “Modern Muckrakers.” This quarterly general-interest magazine devoted to the promotion of seasonal new books now showcased a genre that I believed deserved much greater attention and respect. I turned to it immediately.

Book’s “Modern Muckrakers” provided a short crash course on the century-long tradition of the narratives occupying my thoughts. It traced the history of the revered founders, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Jacob Riis, and Samuel McClure and McClure’s, and it recounted the moment of Theodore Roosevelt’s politicized...

Perhaps a pendulum is ready to swing. Perhaps, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s title, things are approaching the shift that Gladwell defines as The Tipping Point (2000), the moment “when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire” (see introduction).

Social change may proceed slower than wildfire, but the actual conflagration, which was started by nineteen Middle Eastern jihadic terrorists, arguably launched the twenty-first century in the attacks of September 11, 2001. In the United States, the burning, collapsing World Trade Center twin towers became mental templates of ur-disaster. America’s vulnerability was writ large in...