153: Walter Licht's Industrializing America

In Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century, Walter Licht complicates the process of industrialization in the United States during the 19th century by re-examining both the context of American industrial development and the composition of American industry.  In the first move, he situates manufacturing within a rapidly expanding market, which was fueled by a growing population, immigration, westward settlement, expanding cities, and developments in transportation and communication infrastructure; industrialization was a result of these changes as well as an active shaper of market relationships.  In the second move, he expands the focus of industrial manufacturing from large-scale industrialization to the broader business landscape of small factories, specialty shops, and regional diversity, which allows him to separate 19th century industrialization from late 19th century corporate consolidation.  Licht therefore deconstructs the old narrative of 19th century production-driven Progress, arguing instead for a declension from ordered mercantilism to a chaotic market economy that was only beginning to organize toward the end of the century.

Licht synthesizes business history, economics, labor history, and the history of technology to situate American industrialization in its economic, social, political, and regional contexts.  He begins in the early 1800s with regional diversity and the Jefferson/ Hamilton debates; examines the diversity of antebellum development in its mill villages, single-industry cities, diversified urban centers, and Southern "industrial" slavery; discusses artisan protests in Jacksonian American along with with evangelical reform;  charts the relationship between the Civil War and government-sponsored industrialization and transportation; and analyzes regional industrial diversity, the rise of Carnegie, Rockefeller and anti-monopoly politics, and the labor disputes, single-issue reform movements, and utopian critiques of late-19th century urban disorder.

Licht's relentless contextualization, breakdown of industry into regions, and insistence that the voices of workers, women, and immigrants be heard are a welcome relief to the usual histories of 19th century technology.

143: Ruth Schwartz Cowan's Social History of American Technology

Like many other historians of American technology in the 1990s, Ruth Schwartz Cowan argues in A Social History of American Technology that the American technological experience is unique, shaped by a range of factors including geography and cultural diversity.  Cowan emphasizes that the social history of technology (SHOT) involves "integrating the history of technology with the rest of human history," and accordingly she integrates familiar SHOT topics like invention, the American system of manufacturing, technological systems, scientific management, electrification, automobility, flight, and biotechnology with histories of business, economics, and the environment.  She also incorporates groups previously overlooked by SHOT folks, including housewives, engineers, scientists, and people of color (including Native Americans.)  She handles all of these different elements by using case studies rather than grand narratives; the result is a series of deep contextualizations of historical technological development.

132: Don Mitchell's The Lie of the Land

In The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, Don Mitchell uses labor history, critical social theory, and cultural landscape studies to reveal the "connection between the material production of landscape and the production of landscape representations, between work and the 'exercise of the imagination' that makes work and its products knowable" in the construction of California's agricultural landscape.  In doing so, he argues that the "struggles over the form that the reproduction of labor power in industrial agriculture would take" ultimately shaped the landscape.  However, landscape is ideological in that it tends to "erase the politics and actuality of work from the view" (Cosgrove) and naturalize capitalist concepts like property and land ownership.  Therefore, the critical project of The Lie of the Land, to "understand the interplay between production and representation of landscapes, while at the same time restoring an ontology of labor to the center of landscape geography and history," is a political project.

124: Duncan & Duncan: Landscapes of Privilege

In Landscapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb, James Duncan and Nancy Duncan examine the landscape of Bedford, a wealthy community in Westchester County, to understand the relationship between aesthetics and the production of place and identities, and to think through the "wider social consequences of such an aestheticized view of the world."  Via interviews and first-hand landscape observation, they explore several interrelated issues:

• "the ways people produce their identities in and through places, especially homeplaces, such as houses, gardens, and home communities," particularly some of the more “conservative, defensive attempts at using one’s surroundings to establish individual, family, and community identities…. against and in contrast to an outside world” or ‘constitutive outside.’
• the effects, intended and unintended, of a virulent, reactionary politics of anti-development in Bedford in response to all the stars moving in and buying up properties
• the role of Bedford landscapes as symbolic resources used in the quest for social distinction: how residents are invested in Bedford socially, psychologically, economically

99: Domosh & Seager's Putting Women in Place

In Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, Mona Domosh and Joni Seager show that space and place are both gendered and integral to the construction of gender.  In providing an overview of feminist geographical scholarship (up to 2001), they argue that this gendering has historically (and is currently) integral to processes of segregation, dominance, and resistance, in places like work and home as well as in the actions of everyday life.  Further, they situate this discussion of gender and geography within both local urban historical geographies in Western Europe and the US AND a structural analysis of global gender issues.  Their book is divided into six parts:

Home: history and analysis of a space almost universally associated with women.  Focusing on England and the US form the 17th century on, they show how the emerging capitalist system separated the male world of production from the female world of reproduction, from the Victorian cult of domesticity to mid-century suburbia.  They then interrogate the raced and classed connections between notions of domesticity and turn-of-the-century social engineering projects aimed at "Americanizing" urban working-class and immigrant women and rural Native American women.

83: Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal

In Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, Lizabeth Cohen uses the new social history/ history from the bottom up to figure out "how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary factory workers to become effective unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s."  Like E.P. Thompson, Cohen studies Chicago workers' slow progress to class consciousness and unionization in the 1920s and 1930s by looking at whole people embedded in complex communities instead of at the working class as a narrow block defined by productive labor.  Accordingly, she argues that daily life both inside and outside the workplace, combined with changes in politics and the developing consumer market, led to new choices in a new world where daily lives eventually lead to political decisions.

In other words, Cohen looks at how the cultural became political.  She shows that in the 1920s, Chicago, people may have worked together in factories, but they went home to ethnic enclaves and kept their money in their communities: shopped at local stores, banked with local banks, listened to ethnic radio stations, watch movies at local theaters, etc, even though national chains were already penetrating the city.  They participated in popular culture not as a homogeneous mass but as ethnic and racial communities, each interpreting cultural products differently.  Their only organizational experience was in forcing welfare capitalism to meet their needs.

77: Ruth Rosen's Lost Sisterhood

In The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918, Ruth Rosen investigates how gender and class affected the lives of men and women who were involved in the issue of prostitution in the early 20th century.  Her project is to write a history of prostitution from both above and below, so that she can combine the perspectives of the reformers and of the prostitutes into a broader picture of prostitution as it was understood and practiced.  Using a range of primary sources that include committee reports, surveys, studies, official public records, census data, vice committee reports, prostitutes' memoirs, and social workers' and missionaries' records, Rosen argues that prostitution as lived history primarily affected the working classes, prostitution as cultural symbol encompassed all classes of women.  Whether a woman had to sell her body in a loveless marriage for economic protection, for wages as an unskilled worker, or as a "sporting woman," "whatever the choice, some form of prostitution was likely to be involved."

67: Janet Davis' The Circus Age

In The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top, Janet Davis shows that turn-of-the-century railroad circuses and wild west shows were central to the formation of a new, modern American nation-state because they presented an ambiguous picture of America that questioned, played with, and interrogated changing cultural norms.

Davis combines extensive archival work and interdisciplinary methodology to bring the world of the circus to life.  She emphasizes the ways in which transvestites, weight-lifting women, near-naked star performers, and the constant display of married freaks and "abnormal" body types both heightened fears and expressed anxieties about transgression of gender roles within a raced and classed society.  Daring white female riders and animal trainers were presented as dainty ladies despite the risks they took at work, while nonwhite performers were often presented with inverted gender roles and sexualized bodies in sideshow displays; race and class intersected to create a spectacle of gender transgression.  She also shows how circuses played with their relationship to capitalism, both literally as sites of proletarianization and labor unrest (as well as sites of leisure where people went to escape industrialization) and figuratively as fantastic reconfigurations of imperialism in exotic locales.

Throughout, Davis balances performance (both literally and in the academic sense) with the physical production of the circus itself, including advertisements, transportation, and logistics, and she shows how the circus was as much a product of industrial capitalism and empire as it was an escape from the massive social upheavals and prevailing attitudes regarding race, class, and gender.  The book also provides a particular historical answer to a major question in American Studies: by showing how American imperialism abroad intersects with social divisions at home.

64: Sean Wilentz' Chants Democratic

In Chants Democratic, New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850, Sean Wilentz describes the process of "metropolitan industrialization" - aka the alienation of labor - and its impact on emerging class relationships in New York during the Jacksonian era.  In particular, he's interested in the development of class consciousness among the city's artisans.  Like other scholars indebted to E.P. Thompson and the new social history, Wilentz is profoundly interested in the whole lives and particularly the agency of his subjects, but he is careful to integrate the world of the artisans into a more traditional economic and political framework.  He combines these micro/macro approaches to argue that class formation was critical to the social and political crises of the era.