Social History, U.S.

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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, patroons 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.

Turnerian Models

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier affected the class structure in four different ways. The frontier itself was egalitarian as land ownership was available to all free men. Second deference faded away as frontiersmen treated each other as equals. Third the frontiersmen forced new levels of political equality through Jefferson Democracy and Jacksonian Democracy. Finally the frontier provided a safety valve whereby discontented easterners could find their own lands. Historians now agree that few eastern city people went to the frontier, but many farmers did so. (Before 1850 the US had few cities, which were mostly small, and the vast majority of people were rural.) According to the Turner model, the East was most class-like, (most like Europe), and the further west, the more social and political (and even economic) equality.

The Plain Folk of the Old South

Often called yeomen, The Plain Folk of the Old South were the middling white Southerners of the 19th century who owned few slaves or none. Historians have long debated the social, economic and political roles. Terms used by scholars include "common people", "yeomen" and "Crackers." The term favored in Jeffersonian Democracy and Jacksonian Democracy was "yeoman", which emphasized an independent political spirit and economic self-reliance. Romantic portrayals, especially Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1937) and its 1939 film ignored them. Novelist Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, portrayed the degraded condition of whites dwelling beyond the great plantations.

Frank Lawrence Owsley in Plain Folk of the Old South (1949) redefined the debate by starting with the writings of Daniel R. Hundley who in 1860 had defined the southern middle class as "farmers, planters, traders, storekeepers, artisans, mechanics, a few manufacturers, a goodly number of country school teachers, and a host of half-fledged country lawyers, doctors, parsons, and the like." To find these people Owsley turned to the name-by-name files on the manuscript federal census. Owsley argued that southern society was not dominated by planter aristocrats, but that yeoman farmers played a significant role in it. The religion, language, and culture of these common people created a democratic "plain folk" society. Critics say he overemphasized the size of the southern landholding middle class while excluding the large class of poor landless and slaveless white southerners. Owsley assumed that shared economic interests united southern farmers without considering the vast difference inherent in the planters' commercial agriculture versus the yeomen's subsistence life style.

In his study of Edgefield County, South Carolina, Orville Vernon Burton classified white society into the poor, the yeoman middle class, and the elite. A clear line demarcated the elite, but according to Burton, the line between poor and yeoman was never very distinct. Stephanie McCurry argues, yeomen were clearly distinguished from poor whites by their ownership of land (real property). Yeomen were "self-working farmers," distinct from the elite because they worked their land themselves alongside any slaves they owned. Ownership of large numbers of slaves made the work of planters completely managerial.

Social class among blacks and Chinese

Industrial Northeast

Beardian and Marxist Models

Labor Studies

Ethnoreligious Models and Voting Studies

Race, Class and Gender Models

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

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)

Frontier

  • Billington, Ray Allen. America's Frontier Heritage (1984). Analysis of Turner's theories.
  • Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians—Turner, Beard, Parrington. (1969), focus on class analysis

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

Race-Class-Gender

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)
  • Diggins, John Patrick. Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class (1999)
  • Eichar; Douglas M. Occupation and Class Consciousness in America Greenwood Press, 1989
  • Fantasia, Rick, Rhonda F. Levine, Scott G. McNall, eds. Bringing Class Back in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives Westview Press. 1991
  • Featherman, David L. and Robert M. Hauser, Opportunity and Change (1978), advanced quantitative sociology
  • Fussell, Paul. 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)
  • W. Lloyd Warner, Social Class in America: A Manual of Procedure for the Measurement of Social Status (1949)
  • Wright, Erik Olin ed. Approaches to Class Analysis (2005)Marxist essays articles
  • Wunderlin, Clarence E. 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)

See also

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