Social History, U.S.

Social History has been a major scholarly theme for historians of the United States for over 100 years. Since the emergence of the "new social history" in the 1960s, historians have paid special attention to themes of race/ethnicity, class and gender, in addition to geographical patterns and long-term trends.

Colonial Period

Historians in recent decades have explored in microscopic detail the process of settling the new country and creating the social structure.

New England

New England was settled by community groups, that transplanted their social structure from England. In New England there was a flattening--land ownership was a reality for most families, and the system of powerful landlords that pervaded English rural life was not carried over. There was no aristocracy. The strong religious base of the Puritans made the social order revolve around the local Congregational church. Education was a high priority; Harvard College was founded in 1637 and provided most of the ministers and lawyers. By 1700 a rich merchant class grew up in Boston, Salem and other seaports, linking the local economy to the entire British Empire. By 1750 land shortages were causing problems, as New Englanders (called Yankees after 1700) began expanding north into Maine and New Hampshire, and west into New York.

Middle Colonies

The German settlements in Pennsylvania and adjacent areas were communally oriented with a strong religious base. In contrast to New England Yankees, the Germans placed much less emphasis on education and business. In Pennsylvania the Quakers provided the merchant elite, with an economic stratification that contrasted with their egalitarian religion. In the Dutch areas of upstate New York, especially the Hudson River Valley, poltroons acquired vast land holdings and rented the farmlands to tenants. By the early 19th century this caused serious economic and political tensions, and the poltroon system was replaced by individual land ownership. Except for a small number of patroon families, the social structure was relatively level.

Philadelphia and New York became major ports by 1750, with a growing merchant class that dominated politics and the social structure.

Bibliography

Colonial

• Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America 1998
• Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cape of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. 1986.
• Bushman, Richard L. From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 1967.
• John Demos. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (1964) (ISBN: 0195013557)
• Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. 1991. ISBN 0195069056
• Stephen Innes, ed, Work, and Labor in Early America 1988.
• Allan Kulikoff; From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers 2000
• Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 1986; Marxist
• Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993. 3 vols.
• Greven, Philip. Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts
• Lockridge, Kenneth. A New England Town: The First Hundred Years. Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 1970.
• Main, Gloria L. Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 1983.
• Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 1982.

1790-1900

• Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Version of the 1790's (1984)
• Beard, Charles and Mary. The Rise of American Civilization (1927)
• Bledstein, Burt. The Culture of Professionalism: the Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (1976)
• Genovese, Eugene. Roll Jordan Roll slavery and class
• Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991.)
• Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (1997)
• Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), highly detailed scholarly synthesis emphasizing class

1900-21st century

• Lizabeth CohenConsumer's Republic, Knopf, 2003, ISBN 0375407502. Historical analysis of the working out of class in the United States.
• Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1993)

Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye eds Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (1991)

• Jennifer L. Hochschild; Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (1995)
• Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1997)
• Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (2003)
• Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991.)

Local and Ethnic Studies

• Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1994)
• David M Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1925 (1990)
• Thomas A Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (2003)
• Henry M McKiven, Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875-1920 (1995)
• Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1987)
• William Toll, The Making of an Ethnic Middle Class (1982), Jews in Portland Oregon
• David Williams. Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (1999)

Labor Studies

• Paul Bernstein, American Work Values: Their Origin and Development (1997)
• Paul G Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (1981)
• Leon Fink ed. In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture (1994)
• Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (1979)
• Genovese, Eugene. Roll Jordan Roll slavery and class
• Gutman, Herbert G. and Donald H. Bell, eds. The New England Working Class and the New Labor History (1987)
• Gutman, Herbert, Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class (1988)
• Gutman, Herbert, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (1976)
• Hartmut Keil and John B Jentz, eds. German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culture from 1850 to World War I (1988), primary sources (in English translation)
• Nelson Lichtenstein State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2003)
• Stephen P. Rice, Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America (2004)
• Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class, Vintage, 1972 (classic study of the subjective experience of class)
• Charles Stephenson and Robert Asher, eds Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class History (1986)
• Wilentz, Sean. "On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America" Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, No. 4, The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects (Dec., 1982) pp. 45-63 in JSTOR
• Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), highly detailed scholarly synthesis emphasizing class
• Irwin Yellowitz, The Position of the Worker in American Society, 1865-1896 (1969)

Race-Class-Gender

• Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye eds Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (1991)
• Jennifer L. Hochschild; Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (1995)
• Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (1997)

Social science perspectives

• Louise Archer et al. Higher Education and Social Class: Issues of Exclusion and Inclusion RoutledgeFalmer. 2003
• Peter Blau and Otis D. Duncan, The American Occupational Structure (1967) classic study of structure and mobility
• Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (1995), intellectual history
• Harold J. Bershady, ed. Social Class and Democratic Leadership: Essays in Honor of E. Digby Baltzell (1989)
• John Patrick Diggins, Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class (1999)
• Douglas M. Eichar; Occupation and Class Consciousness in America Greenwood Press, 1989
• Rick Fantasia, Rhonda F. Levine, Scott G. McNall, eds. Bringing Class Back in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives Westview Press. 1991
• David L. Featherman and Robert M. Hauser, Opportunity and Change (1978).
• Paul Fussell Class (a painfully accurate guide through the American status system), 1983. ISBN 0-345-31816-1
• David B Grusky. ed. Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective (2001) scholarly articles
• Michael D. Grimes, Class in Twentieth-Century American Sociology: An Analysis of Theories and Measurement Strategies (1991)
• Lawrence E. Hazelrigg and Joseph Lopreato; Class, Conflict, and Mobility: Theories and Studies of Class Structure 1972.
• Susan A. Ostrander; Women of the Upper Class Temple University Press, 1984
• Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks; Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and U.S. Party Coalitions Oxford University Press, 1999
• Jeff Manza; "Political Sociological Models of the U.S. New Deal" Annual Review of Sociology, 2000 pp 297+
• Michael Marmot. The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity 2004
• Geoff Payne. The Social Mobility of Women: Beyond Male Mobility Models (1990)
• Leonard Reissman, Class in American Society (1960), textbook
• Vanneman, Reeve, and Lynn Cannon. The American Perception of Class (1984)
• Daniel J. Walkowitz; Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity University of North Carolina Press, 1999
• W. Lloyd Warner, Social Class in America: A Manual of Procedure for the Measurement of Social Status (1949)
• Erik Olin Wright ed. Approaches to Class Analysis (2005)scholarly articles
• Clarence E Wunderlin, Visions of a New Industrial Order: Social Science and Labor Theory in America 's Progressive Era (1992)

Primary sources

• Robert S. McElvaine. ed; Down & Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the "Forgotten Man" (1983)