122: Mona Domosh's Invented Cities

In Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century New York and Boston, Mona Domosh examines the historical, economic, and cultural origins of city development in Boston and New York.  Shows that in the 19th century, Boston and New York developed different spatial and architectural forms due to their different social/cultural structures, and that in both cases the physical and cultural structures mutually constituted the cities as different entities.  However, in both cities, the cultural landscape of the city represented its middle and upper classes, who produced "visible representations of their individual and group beliefs, values, tensions, and fears" on the urban landscape.  By applying a new cultural geography framework to urban landscape analysis, she brings 19th century urban development to life and shows how spatial patterns and culture shape one another.

75: Kathy Peiss' Cheap Amusements

In Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Kathy Peiss looks at the new spaces of leisure in New York - public halls, picnic grounds, nickelodeons, "pleasure clubs," and street corners to see how gender relations "played out."  In particular, she is interested in the process by which ideas about sexuality, courtship, male power, female dependency, and autonomy got legitimated by and for women.  Working from a wide variety of primary and archival sources, Peiss argues that working-class gender constructs were directly related to changing organizations and meanings of leisure in the new industrial capitalism, which rationalized and controlled labor even as it commercialized and commodified leisure time.  In other words, leisure both reflects and shapes working-class gender constructs.

Peiss focuses on the agency white working women had in constructing gender from 1880-1920.  While married women's leisure time generally occurred within the home and fit into the rhythms of daily life, single working women often led two lives: dutiful daughter on female work rhythms at home, wage-earner on regimented male rhythms at work.  Stuck between male and female worlds, young working women did not seek out the traditional domains of male leisure (saloons); instead, they flocked to the new commercial dance halls, amusement parks, and movie theatres.  Young men soon followed, and the connections between leisure, mutual aid, and manhood loosened as a result.  Instead, leisure became associated with pleasure, mixed-sex company, and individual consumption, and women were more than welcome to come spend their money.

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.

8: Roy Rosenzweig's Eight Hours for What We Will

This book is so lovely and so clear, and, judging from the number of times Rosenzweig's name comes up in the Acknowledgement sections of other books, he's a wonderfully nice guy, too.

Eight Hours for What We Will is a study of the leisure time and space of the working class in the industrial town of Worcester, MA from 1870-1920.  Rosenzweig is a labor historian who was researching and writing in the late 70s/ early 80s, and accordingly his study bear a few hallmarks of the New Social History: he is committed to giving voice to people who were once silenced by history (i.e., working class people); he prefers to work within the specifics of a single community rather than to generalize about national trends; and he is interested in the holistic, everyday lives and culture of the people he is studying, not just a small segment of their lives.

Therefore, his study of working-class people in Worcester might not be generalizable to the nation, but it has a wealth of detail on Swedish wireworkers, the fight for a park in Ward 5, Irish drinking habits, the Protestant-Catholic divide, and what people really did in working-class movie theaters at the turn of the century (they brought their kids and talked - a lot!  Alamo Drafthouse would not approve.)

And as a result of these specific details, Rosenzweig is able to draw some interesting conclusions about why Worcester was considered a 'scab hole' with a chronic open shop problem: the immigrant communities there were so insular and so different from one another that they were unable to unite across ethnic, cultural, or religious lines.  Further, some issues, particularly the fight over working-class saloons, not only divided the working class (Irish Catholics vs Swedish evangelicals) but allowed for some cross-class alliances (particularly among non-drinking Protestants), thus splintering the working class further.  And this splintering worked to the benefit of the industrialists but to the detriment of the workers, who couldn't lobby for shorter days or higher pay as effectively as could workers in other towns.

However, like the workers in David Gartman's Auto Opium, the working classes in Worcester had a weakness for the new mass culture and mass entertainment, and they were eager patrons of amusement parks and movie houses when these came to town.  Unlike Gartman, however, Rosenzweig sees this working class obsession with consumption not as an opiate but as an incredible boon to his subjects.  To patronize amusement parks and movie houses, people had to come out of their ethnic enclaves and mingle with people of other religions, ethnicities, cultures, and sometimes even other classes.  This new mass mingling in new leisure spaces, combined with rising incomes and the development of a new ethnic middle class, led to less antagonism within the working class itself, which in turn provided a foundation for more radical political activism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Basically, modernization and the rise of mass consumer culture at the turn of the century was both the problem (creation of a culture of individual accumulation) and the solution (break down intra-class divisions so the working class can fight its oppressors later on down the line.)  Or at least Rosenzweig hopes so.