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Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
As Virginia transformed from a free laborer-based economy to a slave-based economy, modes of discipline developed that relied on racism: the best way to discourage poor whites from banding with slaves in rebellion was to separate them through racial contempt. -
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Bill Cronon, Changes in the Land
Europeans conceived of land and animals as commodities to be owned and exchanged, whereas Indians used products for their usefulness (usufruct rights) and were incredibly fluid/mobile re: property. This discrepancy was particularly problematic in the realm of property rights. The ways that Europeans and Indians used the land constitute the basis for vast political difference and consequential alterations of American soil (literally and metaphorically). Beavers. -
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Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower
The Pilgrims had a tense relationship with the Indians and lived in perpetual anxiety about the possibility of attacks, concerns about food, their drastic loss in population. They thus built forts and walls. -
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Paul Boyer, Salem Possessed
Accused women were framed as "deviants." This was ultimately not a battle about witchcraft, however - it was a battle between Salem Village and Salem Town re: the Village's efforts to find autonomy from the more commercial, metropolitan Town that they saw as falling off the moral path. -
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Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Revolutionaries feared the mob from below thanks to their liberty-based paradigm, particularly as they moved away from a class-based hierarchy to a society based on (sort of) equality in their rejection of the historical narrative of corrupt English power. They envisioned British action through the lens of "conspiracy-against-liberty." -
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Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness
Covenant Theology - the notion of God’s chosen people among Calvinists - formed the basis of both church and state (e.g. constitutions as covenants with other men, and churches as gatherings of of men who carry out their obligations that their covenant with God requires). Miller also sees the common thread between Edwards and Emerson as the effort to confront divinity on Earth - Emerson saw nature as Godly, whereas Edwards looked for signs to be interpreted. -
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Jill Lepore, The Name of War
King Philip’s War reflected anxiety about colonial identity in the New World: uncultivated land meant the colonists sought to reaffirm their status as civilized citizens against uncivilized Indians and brutal Spanish conquerors. Violence was both necessary to and a manifestation of a slip into savagery. The Puritans were deeply concerned with property and private homes as part of their reformed British identity. -
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Gordon Wood, the Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
Franklin’s folk hero status meant he was the subject of genteel ridicule. He was caught between the middling world (e.g. wanting wealth) and the genteel world - he loved tradesmen but mingled with the wealthy. He also loved Europe until Britain fucked him (but still loved Paris). -
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Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
The Revolution is a story of social leveling. Elites were concerned about a commerce-driven (and debt-ridden) politics that would replace a natural aristocracy, also manifesting in Jacksonian Democracy and the Second Great Awakening. This was not something the Founders actually wanted. Equality was the most important legacy of the Revolution. -
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Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia
Virginia began as a patriarchal society with Virginian gentry and static social hierarchies. Even convivial moments - cock fights, horse races - illustrated and stabilized social hierarchy. This was disrupted by the rise of religious pluralism and the explosion of martial sentiment amid the Revolution. Consequence = individualism and atomization, evidenced in the move West and in segmented homes. -
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Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party
Microhistory of a struggling cobbler who nonetheless participated in the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, and the tarring/feathering of John Malcolm. Young also explores the nature of historical memory: the Tea Party was deployed in revolutionary rhetoric of 1812 (another war against UK) and in labor movements of the 1830s. -
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Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution
After the Coercive Acts shut down Boston's port, women became politicized and involved in the nonimportation movement. This was one example of many that Nash uses to describe how the Revolution was the culmination of a series of resistant acts among blacks, women, the working class, Indians, farmers, etc. In addition, he uses the example of Benjamin Lay, an abolitionist Quaker who threw blood on Quakers who supported slavery. This is a history from the bottom. -
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Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom
Landon Carter, a Virignian slave owner, was concerned with both managing his household and with the events of the Revlution. He had to negotiate between the paternalism of his household (which he desired, particularly with respect to his wayward daughter) and that of King George, which he was not fond of. Nonetheless, he longed for a return to a more obedient time. Moreover, his daughter's female rebelliousness resonated with the sentimental novels of the era. -
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T.H. Breen, Tobacco Culture
Tobacco was a huge industry in Virginia. Farmers, however, were in debt to British creditors (and anxious about it due to the loss of personal autonomy), the crop required a lot of oversight, and farming scattered people across the countryside causing isolation. Panics in the era caused further lack of trust of creditors among farmers. Failures in tobacco manifested in self-esteem. Everyday life dovetailed with martial sentiment of the Revolution. -
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Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town
Cooper, from humble origins, navigated two notions of political authority that imagined leaders as either aristocratic “fathers of the people” or egalitarian “friends of the people” - he struggled to be genteel even as his past as a self-made man made him better suited to be a Republican, which ended up superseding the Federalists. He also cultivated Cooperstown in a way that would [hopefully] educate its unruly new residents through social institutions. -
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Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx
Jefferson was an idealist who loved escaping to Monticello and saw the West as a space to recover the agrarian ideal and postpone the problems of Europe’s political and social congestion. -
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Michael Schudson
our distinct eras of American civil life present shifting role of citizens with respect to class: where in the first era citizens deferred to the leadership of political elites and a “natural aristocracy,” a more egalitarian approach emerged in the Jacksonian era characterized by mobilized rowdy masses. Then we had a combination of expert/managerial rule and direct democracy before a rights-based consciousness and citizenship. -
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Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale
Microhistory of a woman who engaged in a female-managed economy. Although women were in separate spheres from men (which paralleled public/private divides), their work pulled them into neighborhood networks and some degree of public business. -
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Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs
Exploration of the sentimental novels of the era that do not appear in literary canon but nonetheless did important political and cultural work at the time. Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, was an effort to reorganize culture from the women's point of view: slavery could be ameliorated through Christian love and motherhood, not through force. -
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Janet Davis, The Circus Age
Women were visible in public life but showmen reconfigured women either into dainty domestic ladies or erotic artifacts. This was also an era of masculine status anxiety during the Victorian era (illustrated by the emphasis on strong-men showcases, imperialist rhetoric, and discourses of civilization and primitivity. Thus the circus was a metonym for the modern nation state. -
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David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness
A working class consciousness developed that rested on a foundation of race. Whiteness was a way that white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and their need to differentiate themselves from blacks. This logic attracted Irish immigrants in particular and manifested in minstrel shows that distanced white audiences from "black" performers. -
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Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature
Franz Boas argued against Darwinian biological determinism that differences in culture/race were not based on innate capacity, but on the social environment. These ideas were further extended by B.F. Skinner and the behaviorist school of psychology. Cultural Drawinism declined amidst language of equal opportunity. -
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Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land
Land in the West was mythologized as an agricultural paradise and shored up the agrarian ideal. This bore the [wrong] safety-valve theory of the mid-1800s: the West would relieve pressure on property owners in the East thanks to all of the opportunity for growth. The heroes of the West were “noble anarchs owing to no master” - stories about Daniel Boone and Kit Carson romanticized the uncivlilized [white] man. -
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Kathryn Sklar, Catherine Beecher
Catherine Beecher subverted traditional female roles of self-sacrifice/submission in an era of democracy and free will by converting them into signs of leadership and moral authority in her seminar. Morality was more important than piety. She gave women a place in the hierarchy: the female sphere of the home. Domesticity was a palliative to Jacksonian democracy and the deterioration of women’s status that occurred when production moved from the home to the factory. -
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Thomas Dublin, Women at Work
Case history of women in textile factories in Worcester, Massachusetts. Young, single women entered the workforce to shore up their autonomy from their family even as the boardinghouses and corporate paternalist model enabled surveillance and discipline. This model changed in concert with the influx of Irish immigrant women in the 1840s, who sought long-term careers in textiles to support their families (and, because they lived with their families, were absent from the boardinghouse model). -
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Marvin Meyers, the Jacksonian Persuasion
The “Jacksonian persuasion” sought to recall agrarian innocence to a society drawn to capitalist ambition. Jackson framed himself as the “plain man’s candidate” who fought against the Monster Bank. Tocqueville notes the conformity and insatiability embedded in enterprise and equality. People were enormously preoccupied with work and failure was prevalent due to the boom-bust economic cycle. Meyers focuses on anxiety and guilt among aspirational men. -
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David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum
Jacksonian Americans experienced a crisis of confidence in the new republic that manifested in fears of the decline of the family, the loss of the church’s power, and the loosening of community ties. The perceived rise of criminality/poverty/mental illness was proof of social crisis. The asylum was instituted to resolve these social upheavals. Kirkbride architecture (1848). -
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Paul Johnson, The Shopkeeper's Millennium
The rapid expansion of the market in Rochester, NY emerged after the construction of the Erie Canal linked the community to New York, which brought a rootless working population who engaged in bawdy entertainment and booze. Businessmen reasserted authority through evangelizing, holding revivals, and making sure workers went to church - hegemony of businessman over the wage earner. Temperance = condition of conversion. -
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Tamara Hareven, Amoskeag
Women worked for independent wages and to support their family. This is another example of corporate paternalism, and the employer provided leisure activities (e.g. the Amoskeag softball team) to shore up unity and prevent labor unrest. The flood and strike ended everything post-Depression. -
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George Frederickson, The Inner Civil War
Intellectuals lauded radical individualism (like Emerson, who was into secession even though he was an abolitionist). But that individualism gave way to favoring institutions and slow change. Postwar, William James glorified the moral struggle of reformers and questioned how to combine the enthusiasm, courage, and self-sacrifice endemic to warfare without actually committing violence. -
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Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage
Women of the nonradical suffrage movement tailored their political strategy to an increasingly commercial environment. They used modern means of advertising, publicity, commercial entertainment (like pageants and parades), mass-produced accessories, etc. These efforts at once expressed defiance and unity, taught women about entrepreneurship, and funded their political outreach. These strategies also reflected a modern kind of politicking that involved cults of personality, branding, and emotion. -
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Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest
The West has been mythologized as a locus of innocent conquest and as continuous between the past and the present. Indians have been framed as a dying culture. Kit Carson and Daniel Boone have been framed as unencumbered heroes of the wilderness. The West was constructed as a land of "golden opportunity." The reality, however, was that the West was hardly barren, and those who went West relied deeply on the federal government especially where Indians were concerned. -
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Charles Dew, Bond of Iron
William Weaver, a slaveowner who ran a forge, used positive incentives and “overwork” for greater productivity. This style emerged in part because white workers were notoriously unreliable drunks. Skilled slaves were central to the Forge, and consequently Dew did not pursue technological innovation/upgrading. -
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Drew Faust, The Republic of Suffering
The brutality of the war raised questions about the benevolence God even as religion remained a resource for healing wounds. Religious skepticism also ran in tandem with Darwin’s work. Moreover, death was dislocated from the Victorian home (profoundly unsettling for families). On the battlefield, individuals were untrained with weapons and battle formations, so violence was an individualized, chaotic activity. There was an impetus to rationalize and satirize death afterwards. -
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Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club
Ideas are tools that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves - especially after the Civil War. This meant a new faith in scientific inquiry and statistical thinking (e.g. Peirce). Dewey rejected Lockean assumptions about individuals apart from society because all individuals are social participants; and his laboratory school unified learning with doing, and avoided teaching disembodied abstractions. -
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Jeff Meikle, American Plastic
Plastic became a household name in the interwar period thanks to advertising that centered on its utopian potential to stabilize society and democratize the world through creating newness. But its legacy is ambiguous: it offers liberation from the limits of nature but threatens cultural depletion through its artifice; it offered standardization and was imitative of other substances (like tortoise shell) but also endless “plasticity” and fluidity. -
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Oliver Zunz, Making America Corporate
Offices were respectable places for women to work (over the factory) in part because they offered dress codes and gender-segregated tasks. Zunz argues that the bureaucratization of work arose from middle-managers with agency, not elites. This era saw an increase in white collar work, salesmanship, and tinkerer-managers like Ford. -
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Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours For What We Will
Working class workers on Worcester, MA sought to preserve leisure culture from attempted middle-class control (e.g. the saloon was an ethnic working-class democratic leisure institution, while July 4 was an affirmation of cultural distance from elite, middle class, and other immigrants). Movies were also a site for leisure that were initially open to the working class but gave way to middle-class structures. -
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Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues
Foreigners were necessary as both laborers and as consumers in a growing global American market, but Americans were concerned about the impact foreigners would have on domestic institutions (both in labor and in terms of citizenship (e.g. HI, PR). Certain nationalities were framed as more desirable for particular trades than others. Stereotypes of the Orient flourished in particular. -
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Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School
Social reform-based education was replaced by child-centered pedagogy that offered less adult involvement (thanks to Freud). Dewey was not a fan of this - he saw child-centered education as too loose. The Progressive education movement dwindled after many reforms had been achieved, conservatism after the war, and the demands on teachers' time. -
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Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization
Masculinity and manliness were redefined in terms of civilization in often contradictory ways. Power was constructed in terms of civilized manliness and primitive masculinity and drew links between male power and white supremacy. Example: Teddy Roosevelt and power through violent imperialism; G. Stanley Hall's critique of Victorian restraint and neurasthenia. -
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John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man
Threats to the male body were seen in modernity (e.g. overwork) and in temptation (e.g. brothels). Ideal men were seen in Eugen Sandow (body builder), Houdini (harnessed magic and bodily manipulation), and Tarzan (rejection of rational scientific order in favor of primitivity). -
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Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound
Scholars, artists, and industrialists compartmentalized southern music according to race even though this departed from how audiences actually listened to or performed music. Racialized genres were used to advertise and censor (and to develop market segmentation). Southern artists deployed stereotypes to cater to Northerners' desires, in spite of their diverse repertoire and love of pop music. Lomax and 'Cowboy Songs' = myth of Appalachian isolation. -
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Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres
Victorian ideals of sexual polarities were reconfigured. Higher education was central to women challenging biological constructs of gender, manifesting in the rise of social science studies on sexual difference with particular respect to their capacity for education. Also, this professionalization was problematic for reformers, because women spent their time analyzing rather than acting. -
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Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle
Public lynchings constituted a performance that reinscribed white supremacy, notions of legal/social/religious/racial justice, and individual authority alongside the state’s authority. Photographs naturalized, nationalized, and domesticized violence, but were also used in anti-lynching activism by the NAACP (who also hated Birth of a Nation). Blacks framed lynching as martyrdom and whites as uncivilized. -
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William Leach, Land of Desire
New American creed: consumption ethic centered on democratized desire, the cult of the new, and monetary value crowded out other American visions. The “mind-cure” movement emerged to be wish-oriented, sunny, optimistic, and lacking in anything tragic. The central conviction was that Americans could shape their own destiny (see Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). Glass windows in dept. stores democratized desire. -
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John Kasson, Amusing the Millions
Coney Island amusements represent a growing cultural revolt against genteel Victorian standards of taste and conduct into the 1920s. Fashion at Coney Island (i.e. on the beach) was much less restrictive than streetwear. Rides like the steeplechase also offered physical removal from Victorian standards. -
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Mark Smith, Social Science in the Crucible
Social scientists were embroiled in debates over objectivism (find the truth but don’t use it) and purposivists (committed Progressive-esque reformers). Robert Lynd, for example, completed the Middletown Studies to understand institutions through larger communities. Harold Lasswell explored political psychology and believed social scientists should use propaganda to achieve normative ideals because propaganda was inevitable. Ssocial experts were to use their knowledge to improve society. -
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Michael Lerner, Dry Manhattan
Story about resistance to inefficient prohibition enforcement in New York City, which created new cultural and social forms. Women rejected moral guardian role in favor of the flapper and the saloon-goer. Harlem became a cultural center. Prohibition-propaganda was xenophobic (even though immigrants were hard to reach due to language). WWI was a boon for prohibition: healthy soldiers = strong soldiers. Prohibition songs emerged. -
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Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal
Welfare capitalism: employers provided some benefits and company picnics to workers while accentuating their ethnic differences, while local ethnic organizations provided charity. Mass culture was also largely ethnicized. Depression: employers balk, ethnic banks fail, people are left high and dry. The Feds step in and moral capitalism begins. Mass culture also enabled a common working-class consciousness. -
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Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream
Admen constructed new desires for a nascent modern republic even as they were removed from the consumer public. Women were ideal consumer citizens due to their emotionality and ignorance. Strategies: competitive copy, color, radio ads (even though they were intrusive). Consequences: reimagine the consumer, not the product, atomization and inward turns, consumption ethic and therapy in the face of modernity. Ads were solutions to anxiety. -
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Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty
"Terrible honesty" refers to a revolt against sentimentality, restraint, emotion, and unattainable moral standards of the Victorian era. The era thus comprised matricide against Victorianism (in psychoanalytic terms), as evidenced by the collusion between white and black culture in NYC. Example: Dvorak's use of black spirituals; changing role of the piano. -
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Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels
The urban black working class used “infrapolitics” - daily struggles - as invisible forms of political action: for example, talking loudly on streetcars or leaving work early to go to dance halls. Example: public transportation as theater for resistance due to its relative anonymity; young black subculture, bebop, and hair-conking. -
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Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods
Fundamentalists were pissed about theological liberalism and what they saw as evidence of social depravity. The trial highlighed individual liberty versus majority rule. Even though Darrow lost he was lauded in the national press. Later, the trial was deployed in Inherit the Wind as an allegory of McCarthyism. -
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Michael Denning, The Cultural Front
The development of the Left was not simply a reaction to the Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe: it was a moment of consciousness spurred by the Popular Front and the rise of a mass-cultural apparatus and state cultural institutions. Leftist consciousness flowed through cultural forms (e.g. Disney animations, Billie Holliday's "Strange Fruit"). -
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Donald Worster, The Dustbowl
The Dust Bowl and the Depression both revealed weaknesses in America: the Dust Bowl started because expansion encountered volatile, marginal land that disrupted the ecological balance that had evolved. Nature was viewed as capital and man was obligated to use nature for advancement. -
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John Dower, War Without Mercy
Propaganda reveals that the Japanese were more hated than the Germans because they were perceived as a race/species apart. Stereotyped propaganda was ambiguous: Japanese were both children before the war and super men afterwards, and after the war, the child became a pupil to be cured. Americans were framed by Japanese in terms of purity and in terms of their savagery for being racist. -
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Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors
Cowboy capitalists who distrusted the government and sought an economic frontier moved from the Midwest to Orange County. They were also anti-communist and socially conservative. Kitchen table activism among women in particular coincided with their support of Barry Goldwater, but after his defeat, they turned away from anti-communism and towards single social issues. -
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Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone
Social capital on the decline. Causes: urban sprawl, generational change, television. Problems inhere in bridging/bonding social capital. -
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Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound
The containment ideal was not to leave the home but to emancipate women within it: sexual containment in marriage in particular would keep men and women vital and would foster wholesome childrearing. The home was a private means to salve the anxiety induced by the Cold War. -
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Douglas Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity
There was a widespread concern that social alienation left people craving certainty through the totalitarian state. The New Left saw estrangement as a prerequisite for radicalism. The Christian Left that Rossinow focuses on saw estrangement from God as the ultimate source of alienation, which led to their pursuit of Christian Existentialism. Activism was the way to solve alienation and to find connections between self and world. -
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Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested
SNCC was created to extend civil rights past the lunch counter (“more than a hamburger.”). The era also saw the hiring of corrupt policemen and lack of convictions for violence against civil rights workers. -
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Carl Bogus, Buckley
Buckley led a movement fueled by fear of communist expansion/infiltration, the naivete of American leaders, the civil rights movement, the downfall of capitalism, the rise of self-indulgence and dependence, and the rise of secularism. He combined libertarianism, neoconservatism, and social conservatism while eschewing the fringe John Birch Society and objectivism, as well as paleoconservatives like Kirk and Nisbet. -
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Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?
Members of the working class are duped into following political conservatism due to their attention to hot-button social issues rather than social equality (caused by elites), and once those elites are in office, they pursue a path of liberalism and deregulation that harms those who voted them in. And then the elites blame the “liberal elite” establishment for social issues remaining problematic. -
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Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad
Radical feminism saw patriarchal capitalism as the source of all problems and endeavored to restart everything through disrupting patriarchy (and ignoring race/class); cultural feminists aimed to essentialize and celebrate femaleness alongside maleness. Radical feminists experienced lots of in-fighting, particularly over the quesiton of consciousness-raising (too navel-gazey? Did it crowd out quieter voices?). -
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Frances Fitzgerald, Cities on a Hill
Visionary communities conceived of as alternatives to alienated culture and as a means to ameliorate anxiety and instability. Common thread: personal and spiritual renewal and reestablishment of communitarian control. Lynchburg, the city of Liberty Baptist Church run by Jerry Falwell. His authority was secured through manichean, militarized rhetoric and in-group/out-group constructions. -
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Mike Davis, City of Quartz
The story of Los Angeles is the story of class and race hierarchy. Downtown skyscrapers built by Japanese money are designed to keep out the poor and make the bourgeoisie feel secure. The LAPD and homeowners’ associations in the suburbs are “space police” to keep poor minorities in their place. Race and class tensions have promoted the destruction of public space. Safety is obtained through obedience to local power. Merger of design, public space, security apparatus - geography of power. -
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Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain
Tradition of snake-handling included a loss of self, total surrender, adrenaline rushes, experiences of vivacity, spontaneity - all in all, ecstasy. -
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Nate Blakeslee, Tulia
Tulia lacked open racial politics and was integrated, but racial issues lingered below the surface. Black community was a problem for law enforcement, and blacks viewed stings as a reaction against interracial mixing. Blakeslee also describes the national press's framing of Tulia as "bumpkins" and how outside legal help was framed as outside agitation.