157: Susan Strasser's Never Done

In Never Done: A History of American Housework, Susan Strasser argues that housework, the job done by more people in America than any other, "cannot be separated from the broader social and economic history of the United States."  The women who did housework supported the men who built factories and cities, and the manufactured products and urban culture produced in those factories and cities in turn shaped women's housework.  Strasser thus brings 19th century housewives into history AND provides an exhaustive history of household technologies.

Strasser is interested in what 19th century housewives actually did and what technologies they really used, not in the history of the technologies per se; the date that most households seemed to have a particular kind of technology and how most housewives seemed to use it are a lot more important to her than the date the technology was patented or the technological innovations that went into it or when the first privileged few got ahold of it.  Therefore, she uses new social history methodologies to access her subject.  Her sources include reformers' reports on intolerable living conditions, government documents on standards of living, sociologists' descriptions of daily life, manufacturers' market research, ads, catalogues, travel accounts, letters, and advice manuals, cookbooks, and women's magazines.  In all of these sources, she's looking not so much at the opinions or prescriptive advice but at the ways in which particular technologies and practices are framed - as new, old-fashioned, commonplace, etc.  This strategy allows her to approximate what American housewives' lives might have been like at different points in time form 1850 to 1930.

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.

91: Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors

In Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Lisa McGirr traces the development of the Conservative movement in Orange County from 1945 to Reagan's presidential election in 1980; she argues that the Right used religion and consumerism to create a movement that combined an emphasis on individual experience with the collectivism required to create social change.  Using archival sources and oral histories with activists and ordinary people who helped build the conservative movement in Orange County in the 1960s, McGirr builds the history of the Conservative movement from the ground up.

McGirr's interest in telling the rise of the Right from its own perspective creates a nuanced picture of right-wing activism in Orange County.  She shows that upwardly mobile, white, educated, suburban moms and dads were attracted to Conservatism because it resonated with their own experiences as successful individuals and as Westerners who were suspicious of "liberal Washington intellectuals'" intervention in their lives.  Orange County Conservatives also included many competing worldviews, including long-held libertarianism, a religious interest in fighting godlessness and immorality, a distrust of "collectivism," and an interest in a return to American foundational values.  Anti-Communism held these libertarians and social conservatives together (along with extremist groups like the John Birch Society) in the 1950s and early 1960s.  However, after Goldwater's defeat in 1964 the Orange County Right broke with extremist groups and forged a more mainstream, populist conservative movement under Ronald Reagan that attacked general liberal permissiveness, big government, welfare, and criminality.  The parallel rise of 1960s counterculture and evangelical Christianity in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought a host of new social concerns, state welfare programs, and religious zeal for a return to morality; this stoked a fire that spread nationally and ended up getting Reagan elected president.

While McGirr's method is not innovative from a history perspective, her choice of subject is unusual for a study of social movements, as most social movement theorists include a progressive or left agenda and an association with an oppressed group in their definitions of social movements.  However, her grassroots analysis of the Right's rise to power and her interest in reading members of the Right from their own perspectives provides a depth of analysis that does justice to an incredibly powerful movement.

88: Robin D. G. Kelley's Race Rebels

In Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, Robin Kelley argues that extra-institutional forms of resistance, not formal SMOs, are foundational to black workers' larger struggle for racial and economic justice.  Building on James Scott's "infrapolitics," or everyday small acts of resistance, evasion, and defiance, Kelley shifts the political history of the black working class to the "margins of struggle," the unorganized, often spontaneous battles with authority, and the social movements that are somehow thought to be "inauthentic" representations of a community's interests.  He thus locates black political resistance in the complexity of the lived experience of ordinary people whose lives are raced and classed.

Kelley investigates black infrapolitics in a variety of 20th century settings and constructs: the double-edged sword of the "mask of grins and lies"in the pre-WWII South; African American Communists in the South and African American volunteers in the Spanish-American War; the zoot suits, bebop, and hipster ethic in the black male working-class culture of Malcolm X's youth and the gangsta rap of 1990s LA; bus protests long before Rosa Parks' formal resistance.  In each situation, he locates resistance at a wide variety of scales, from enlisting to fight in a war or working to build the Communist party to walking, smiling, dressing, sitting, or singing in a certain way and in a certain time and place.

By focusing on infrapolitics, Kelley is able to situate now-famous protests like the Woolworth's sit-ins in a long tradition of extra-institutional, everyday resistance; as George Lipsitz points out, he is also able pinpoint the beginnings of social movements in everyday forms of resistance that overcome oppression even as they are structured by its particular spatial, economic, and cultural forms.

86: James Grossman's Land of Hope

James Grossman's Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration looks at the Great Black Migration as a social process of migration and adaptation that linked together North and South, culturally as well as geographically.  Grossman works in the new social history tradition, so his interest is in the experiences and decisions made by black Southerners who participated in the migration, as well as in their perceptions of their new lives in Chicago.

Looking at the Migration from the perspective of black Southerners, Grossman discovers that the decision to move North was made by the migrants themselves, not by larger structural forces.  The migrants evaluated the North based on the world they knew in the South, not abstract notions of equality.  And initially, Chicago really was a land of hope: the city offered higher wages, more autonomy, the ability to vote, and better schools for their children than were available in the South.  While some historians interpret the migration as a structural shift from rural to urban work, Grossman argues that it was a conscious move by black Southerners to gain opportunity and freedom.

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."

72: Jane Hunter's Gospel of Gentility

In The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China, Jane Hunter argues that women missionaries in turn-of-the-century China were able to use missionary work to greatly expand women's sphere even as they supported submissive roles for women and lived relatively circumscribed lives at the mission.  Hunter accesses this paradoxical construction of American womanhood in China primarily via the letters and private papers of some 40 female missionaries from different denominations who worked in China from 1900 to 1922, when some 60% of Protestant missionaries in China were women.  She also includes information from interviews and the archives of two mission boards.  Because their status as outsiders in Chinese culture throws the missionaries' gender norms in high relief, the book highlights the feminization of Protestantism and the ways in which American womanhood intersected with work, religion, and cross-cultural exchanges.

70: Eric Foner's Reconstruction

Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 is a synthetic history of American Reconstruction that combines social, political, and economic aspects of Reconstruction into three overarching themes:

• the centrality of black experience
• the larger context of an emergent national state
• the impact of social, political, economic, and moral developments in the North affected the course of Reconstruction in the South

A synthesis of "revisionist" scholarship on black experiences after slavery, Foner's book clearly and consistently emphasizes the experiences, worldviews, interpretations, and actions of black Southerners across class lines.  He thus builds on the work of new social historians and continues WEB DuBois' project in Black Reconstruction, which rewrote the history of the Reconstruction period by reframing black "debauchery" as white racism and a deliberate attempt to retain the power of white elites by discrediting freed blacks.  He also integrates "post-Revisionist" studies into his argument by showing how Reconstruction policies themselves were woefully inadequate, and thus the North, as well as the South, was complicit in the failure of the Reconstruction project.  Even though freed blacks were eager to take control of their working lives and many had millenial expectations of a post-racial society, white Southerners were so afraid of losing their disciplined workforce that they blocked land purchases, denied credit access, built exploitation into a new sharecropping system, and used violence to prevent freed people from exercising their newfound freedom.

60: David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness

In Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger argues that whiteness is an ideology that was constructed in the 19th-century, when working-class whites responded to the increased wage dependence, standardization, and discipline attached to the Industrial Revolution by separating themselves from blacks, demonizing them, and accepting the "public and psychological" value of whiteness as part of their wage.  The compensation of these "wages of whiteness" led to a kind of self oppression, which both made them willing to accept a lot more misery than they would otherwise have taken and kept them from organizing with black workers against their mutual exploitation.

This deceptively simple argument has several constituent parts, as Roediger pulls from an updated classical Marxism, new labor history, new social history, and theories of racism to delineate the development of whiteness and connect it to the formation of the working class in the early 19th century.  Critical to his argument is the expansion of Marxist theory to include race: he argues that race cannot be reduced to class, and that the two social categories work in dialectic with one another.  From the new labor/ new social history, he pulls the insistence that working class people are historical agents, not dupes controlled by capital, and that they are thus complicit in the construction of their own racism.  And he builds on existing theories of race, racism and slavery (most notably George Rawick) to show that racism developed as a response to early 19th-century capitalist development, of which slavery was a constituent part: nostalgia for a pre-industrial past, combined with frustration at their own proletarianization, resulted in white working-class racism and hatred toward black slaves as emblems of both preindustrial peasants and industrial capitalist workers.  From there, the step to racism as a constituent element of white working class identity was a small one.

The rest of the book includes two case studies that Roediger largely pulls from secondary sources: blackface minstrelsy as a way to provide an outlet for white racial tensions and frustrations; and the story of how the black Irish adopted racism against blacks to assume a white American identity.  In both cases, Roediger shows how racism both constructs and masks the blackness that is at the heart of whiteness.  While I was surprised to find that such an innovative and hugely influential thesis is built on secondary evidence and conjecture more than empirical research, I think the case studies illustrate Roediger's argument well, and I really like his innovative use of developments in studies of race, slavery, and the working class that came out of the new social history.

59: George Rawick's From Sundown to Sunup

In From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community,  George Rawick stresses the agency and relative autonomy of American slaves "from sundown to sunup" - those few hours when they weren't expected to work the fields - to create the behaviors and institutions that helped them survive the oppression of slavery.

Rawick has two main theses.  First, he argues that black slaves developed an autonomous community outside of the white environment; this community was shaped by both their experiences in the US and their African heritage.  The backbone of this community was communication among slaves, which relied on travels of free blacks, reading of white newspapers, and the "interplantation" movement of the slaves themselves; it encouraged different levels of resistance, fostered a separate series of religious practices, and supported the continuity of the black family.  It also kept the slaves from having to become "Sambos."

Second, he argues that there was a connection between the parallel emergence of slavery and capitalism.  I'm not sure I buy this argument, but Rawick claims that racism has European roots; black Africans were seen as rural peasants who represented a longed-for but unreachable past, and therefore slavery and racism were punishment meted out to blacks.  And then racism played an important role in the growth and continuity of slavery and in the development of American culture more generally.

From Sundown to Sunup was one of the earliest books on slavery that treated slaves as subjects and actors instead of as victims and objects; working from an assumption of subjectivity allowed him to create whole worlds based on slave narratives and psychological and psychological theories.  This focus on slaves as conscious, subjective actors also allowed Rawick to overturn two oversimplifying accounts of slave culture: Kenneth Stampp's argument that slaves lived in a state of cultural chaos, unable to practice their African cultures and unable to understand American culture; and Stanley Elkins' argument that slave personalities were almost entirely determined by their subordination to authoritarian masters.  Thus, while it suffers from the same lack of verifiable data as do other attempts to reconstruct slave culture (and in Rawick, this lack is particularly exacerbated because he uses slave narratives from the Civil War era to reconstruct slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries), the book still puts forward a theory of racism and a respect for slave subjectivity that continues to impact later works.

55: Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul

In Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Walter Johnson details the large slave market in antebellum New Orleans from 1830-1860 in an exploration of the cultural implications of turning human beings into property.  In doing so, he illustrates how slave markets, and particularly the point of sale, spatialized and embodied dynamics of race, economics, and power.  He argues that these markets were central to the construction of Southern culture because they highlight the central contradiction of antebellum slavery.

To reconstruct the internal dynamics of the slave market, Johnson studies a wide range of sources, including slaveholders' letters, acts of sale, records of the Louisiana Supreme Court, letters, diaries, business records, and narratives of escaped slaves, all in pursuit of the "experience" of slavery, the market, and the sale.  The result is a book structured around the point of sale and the asymmetrical relationships among the three parties involved: the slave, the slave holder, and the trader.  All three approached this point using various forms of resistance, manipulation, and negotiation, and all are situated in the pens, offices, and selling blocks of the market.

The crucial thing here is that Johnson clearly portrays the agency and potential for resistance of all three parties, including the slaves, and he reconstructs the worlds of all three, including the spaces - pens, boardinghouses, and plantations - in which they live and encounter one another.  Like the new social historians of slavery and labor, Johnson is very much interested in the world as it was lived and perceived by each group; building on their work, he also explores the shifting power relationships and negotiations among them.  He concludes that transforming people into property had broad cultural implications for all three groups: planters' perceived superiority lies in their ability to judge and get a good price on the bodies of slaves; slaves balanced the knowledge that they could be sold at any moment with a desire to build community, even in the pens; traders come to see the slaves as the commodities that hold their community together, rather than as people.

And no one liked the space of the market itself (save maybe the traders, who apparently merrily ate their lunches together there) - to the planters, it smacked of grubby commercialism, and to the slaves, it smelled of fear and filth.  Although focusing on New Orleans does force Johnson to exclude other markets, it does allow him to drill down into a particular time and place.  And the guilt, distaste, fear and brute indifference of that place are harrowing.  It's no wonder that it was destroyed soon after the Civil War - but I do think it's important to resurrect it here.

52: Herbert Gutman's The Black Family

In The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Herbert Gutman builds on John Blassingame's strategy of studying slave communities from the inside out to argue that between 1750 and 1925, black families were able to adapt to slavery while retaining cultural traditions, continuous kinship connections, and the "double-headed kin-related household;" they thus created a new African American culture that and strong communities that helped them navigate their lives after freedom.  He thus dispels two common (in the 1970s) scholarly assumptions about black family life: that slavery had destroyed any stable family structures, so that black home life in America was characterized by instability and promiscuity, and that this "pathological" condition of black family life had been growing worse over time.

Like many other scholars around this time, Gutman was very interested in E.P. Thompson's new social history, which shifted the focus of historical inquiry from relations between groups to relations within them.  To access this information, he uses a wide variety of sources, including plantation records, county census schedules, Freedman's Bureau Records, family letters, court testimony, literature, anthropological studies, and oral histories.  He also structures the book to follow his own research process, so that the reader follows him back in time from the 20th century to the 1740s, when the plantation system first developed.

In addition to establishing the resiliency of black families, he also established the agentive force within black communities that developed in a space separate from black-white relations.  While the possibility that any community can develop autonomously outside the reach of unequal power relations was questioned even as Gutman was writing, as was the separation of politics and culture, Gutman's book still goes a long way toward recovering slave families and bringing them into the historical record.

50: John Blassingame's The Slave Community

Published in 1972, John Blassingame's The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South uses autobiographies of fugitive slaves and survivors of slavery to show that the experience of slavery varied widely with time and place.  More importantly, he argues that slave communities, which operated both in response to their particular conditions of oppression and along their own internal dynamics, were crucial in shaping slaves' experience of slavery and the institution of slavery itself.  Blassingame thus refutes the position of many white scholars of slavery, particularly Stanley Elkin, that the oppression of slavery flattened all slave personalities into "smiling Sambos."  Slavery was certainly oppressive, but it was not universally so, and many slaves had freedom within slave quarters, religion, and the family to create a culture that influenced both black and white society.

Blassingame traces the development of slave culture in American from the slave trade in Africa and the Middle Passage; he argues that slaves retained their culture even as they adapted to new work habits, and he discusses the relationship between slave families, runaways, and resistance to slavery.  He also deconstructs the three main stereotypes of slave personality (Sambo, the affectionate, loving servant; Jack, the shifty, lazy good-for-nothing, and Nat, the calculating rapist and murderer) by examining life on different plantations (cotton, sugar, tobacco.)

This book is controversial both because of its sources and its claims.  Blassingame relied heavily on slave narratives (supported by plantation records) in order to construct slave communities from the inside, and critics were concerned that many narratives were shaped either by abolitionists with an agenda or by the age of the ex-slaves.  I also question his rather dubious claim that slave personalities could still be fitted into universal types.

However, despite these issues, the book was well-received by scholars who were interested in reclaiming the voices of oppressed peoples because it allows the slaves to speak for themselves.  It also suggests that slaves were far less passive than previous accounts had assumed, that they had agency and enough autonomy to create their own cultures, and that as a result the relationship between masters and slaves was often closer to a kind of negotiation than an exploitative imbalance of power.  Slave culture was thus integral to the culture of antebellum Southern America.

43: Linda Kerber's Women of the Republic

In Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, Linda Kerber rewrites early American history to include women.  In doing so, she defines "Republican Motherhood," a Revolutionary era "political context in which private female virtues might comfortably co-exist with the civic virtue that was widely regarded as the cement of the Republic."  Unlike the colonial woman, who lived and worked in the context of her family and community, the Republican Mother "integrated political values into her daily life."  The ambivalent relationship between motherhood and citizenship, then, becomes one of the most complex legacies of the Revolution.

Republican Motherhood was a way for women to claim a significant political role in the New Republic without totally destroying the existing social fabric, as well as a way for them to enter public life without leaving their homes.  Republican Mothers enacted their newfound political responsibility by nurturing "public-spirited male citizens" and teaching them the virtues that make good citizens; political virtue thus became domesticated, because the mother, not the public, was in charge of civic morality.  However, this new political identity was severely circumscribed, as women were still required to remain isolated in their homes and thus had no way to collectively define themselves or act politically as a group in the public sphere.

Kerber places the figure of the Republican mother in the context of larger social change in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when industrialization was increasingly pulling fathers out of the home for work and mothers were left with full childrearing responsibilities.  The new, wildly-fluctuating commercial market also allowed laws regarding women's ownership of property to relax, as it became increasingly difficult to determine how much anyone's property was worth, let alone a wife's versus a husband's.  And the new expectations for an educated public led many women to read and write more actively than before, though they often spend more time escaping into romance novels than reading political treatises.

While I would have liked more discussion on women of color and on men in conjunction with this concept, and while I'm a little fuzzy on how romance novels led to increased female empowerment, Kerber's Republican Motherhood clearly elevated the status of mothers, blurred lines between public and private spaces, linked politics and culture through the printed word, and did a host of other fascinating things for women.

42: David Hall's Worlds of Wonder

Like John Butler and Bob Abzug, David Hall sets out to decenter Parry Miller's Puritan-focused history of religion in early America.  In Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Vernacular Religion in Seventeenth Century New England, Hall argues that far from an institutional orthodoxy, religion in the New World was a fluid process in which formal Christianity and popular religious beliefs informed one another.  Unlike in the Old World, multiple belief systems didn't exist side by side; they intermingled - to the point where clergy incorporated wonder and miracles and regular people worried about sin and repentance.

Unlike Butler, Hall relies not just on formal church records but on any source that will give him information about the religious lives of ordinary people; he thus reads official manuscripts alongside popular broadsheets, ballads, chapbooks, and devotional books, all of which would have been accessible to regular people.  Hall's is not the first book to extend the "new social history" to religion (that honor belongs to Keith Thomas' 1971 study of witchcraft in Europe), but it IS the first to use this method for religion in the New World.  It also does a good job of situating American religion in its broader transatlantic context, rather than trying to keep it separate as something uniquely American. AND it contributes to the history of reading in America by expanding the definition of "literature" to include popular publications.

While it would be nice not to have to infer what people were thinking based on the few popular written sources we have left from them, and while it would be even nicer if this book didn't extrapolate from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to speak for all of New England, Hall does bring in new, interesting sources, like the Wonder Books and Samuel Sewell's journals, and I, for one, am entertained by the idea of Puritan ministers incorporating the language of witchcraft into their sermons in hopes of reaching more of the people.

38: Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone

Ira Berlin's argument in Many Thousands Gone is a simple one: the slave experience in America varied over time and from place to place, and as the institution of slavery matured from 1619 to 1861, racism and slavery fed on one another to increasingly exploit and degrade African Americans.  Although this book was published in 1998, it is the first major synthetic work to argue that slavery was not a monolithic, unchanging enterprise from such a long view.

Berlin divides the history of American slavery into four regions (the North, the Chesapeake, the Lowcountry, and the lower Mississippi Valley) and compares them across three chronological eras.  The first or 'charter generation' of slaves were cosmopolitan Atlantic creoles, many of whom came from West Africa or the West Indies, had interacted with the Spanish or Portuguese, and had worked as translators or interpreters.  Slavery was relatively fluid in all four regions, and some slaves bought their freedom, baptized children, had children with whites, and owned property.  Beginning in the late 17th century, three revolutions then transformed slavery.  The Plantation Revolution, which began in Barbados and spread to the Chesapeake and the Carolinas in the late 17th/ early 18th centuries, consolidated planter power and shifted from wage to slave labor.  The Democratic Revolution produced the first sustained intellectual opposition to slavery in the New World, but had contradictory effects on slavery: it became more entrenched in the South, began to disappear in the North and Old Northwest, and was accompanied in all regions by virulent racism.  The Cotton Revolution undercut the illusion that slavery was a dying institution by expanding slavery, despite decreasing production, soil exhaustion, and shift to grain.

While this is largely a synthetic work, Berlin does employ a number of innovations.  First, he focuses on two unique overarching developments: the shift from "societies with slaves" to "slave societies," and the historical development of race as a generational phenomenon.  His focus on the generational development of race is particularly important because the generations up with the three chronological periods under study.  But even more important is his insistent preservation of dual points of view - both the history of slavery and the diverse histories of the people who were enslaved.  He thus combines two very different ways of doing history: as a narrative of domination, and as an exploration of the cultures and agency of the oppressed.

If you would like more info, there is a much more in-depth summary here.