Southern Indiana depicts a distinctive place at a special time: the beginning of the modern era, 1910 to 1920. During those years, this region of 26 counties, from which Indiana and much of the Old Northwest had developed a century before, was in transition toward consumerism and mass culture, as symbolized by automobiles, road-building, movies, radio, and popular magazines. Southern Indiana
celebrated the state's centennial; political progressivism in the era contributed to, among other things, prohibition and women's suffrage. Americans for the first time sent young men off to war in...