Class and the history of working people in the early republic

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 527-535

  Rockman, Seth ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949791491     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jer.2005.0083     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. For overviews on class as an analytical category in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American history, see Ronald Schultz, "A Class Society? The Nature of Inequality in Early America," in Inequality in Early America, ed. Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (Hanover, NH, 1999), 203-221;
2. Greg Nobles, "Class," in A Companion to Colonial America, ed. Daniel Vickers (Malden, MA, 2003), 259-87;
3. Peter Way, "Labour's Love Lost: Observations on the Historiography of Class and Ethnicity in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of American Studies, 28 (April 1994), 1-22;
4. John Ashworth, "Class in American History: Issues and a Case Study," in The State of U.S. History, ed. Melvyn Stokes (Oxford, UK, 2002), 367-86;
5. Christopher Tomlins, "Why Wait for Industrialism? Work, Legal Culture, and the Example of Early America: An Historiographical Argument," Labor History, 40 (1999), 5-34.
6. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America (New York, 2001);
7. David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York, 2004).
8. For the most recent scholarship on poverty, see Billy G. Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America (University Park, PA, 2004).
9. Paul A. Gilje, ed., Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic (Madison, WI, 1997);
10. John L. Larson, "Code Shifting," unpublished paper presented at PEAES Inaugural Conference, Philadelphia, April 2001
11. David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers with Democracy and Free Labor during the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1993);
12. Michael Merrill, "Putting 'Capitalism' in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 52 (April 1995), 210-26;
13. Christopher Tomlins, "Subordination, Authority, Law: Subjects in Labor History," International Labor and Working-Class History, 47 (Spring 1995), 56-90;
14. Sonya Rose, "Class Formation and the Quintessential Worker," in Reworking Class, ed. John R. Hall (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 133-66;
15. Gerda Lerner, "Rethinking the Paradigm," in Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York, 1997), 146-84;
16. Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries Black and White Labor (New York, 1998);
17. James B. Schmidt, Free to Work: Labor Law, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, 1815-1880 (Athens, GA, 1998);
18. Robert Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2001);
19. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA, 2002);
20. Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).
21. David Waldstreicher, "The Vexed Story of Human Commodification Told by Benjamin Franklin and Venture Smith," Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer 2004), 268-78;
22. Amy Dru Stanley, "Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations," Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer 2004), 279-88;
23. Stephanie Smallwood, "Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits of Anti-Slavery Ideology in the Early Republic," Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer 2004), 289-98;
24. Walter Johnson, "The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question," Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer 2004), 299-308.
25. Walter Johnson, "On Agency," Journal of Social History, 37 (Fall 2003), 113-24.
26. Paul E. Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper (New York, 2003). To accept class politics as the driving force behind Patch's jumps is something that apparently does not come easy to many college students. In a recent class, my favorite comment was one to the effect that jumping off a cliff to stop the wheels of capitalism is like getting a body piercing to show your opposition to the World Trade Organization - utterly ineffective.
27. Marcus Rediker, "The Revenge of Crispus Attucks; or, The Atlantic Challenge to American Labor History," Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, 1 (Winter 2004), 38.
28. See also Richard Oestreicher, "The Counted and the Uncounted: The Occupational Structure of Early American Cities," Journal of Social History, 28 (Winter 1994), 351-61.