The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900

by Stuart Mack Blumin

• ISBN13: 9780521376129
• ISBN10: 0521376122
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1989-09-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Of all the terms with which Americans define themselves as members of society, few are as elusive as "middle class." This book traces the emergence of a recognizable and self-aware "middle class" between the era of the American Revolution and the end of the nineteenth century. The author focuses on the development of the middle class in larger American cities, particularly Philadelphia and New York. He examines the middle class in all its complexity, and in its day-to-day existence--at work, in the home, and in the shops, markets, theaters, and other institutions of the big city. The book places the new language of class---in particular the new term "middle class"--in the context of the concrete, interwoven experiences of specific anonymous Americans who were neither manual workers nor members of urban upper classes.

Table of Contents

List of tables and figures	viii	(3)
Preface	xi
1 The elusive middle class	1	(16)
2 "Middling sorts" in the eighteenth-century city	17	(49)
3 Toward white collar: nonmanual work in Jacksonian America	66	(42)
4 Republican prejudice: work, well-being, and social definition	108	(30)
5 "Things are in the saddle": consumption, urban space, and the middle-class home	138	(54)
6 Coming to order: voluntary associations and the organization of social life and consciousness	192	(38)
7 Experience and consciousness in the antebellum city	230	(28)
8 White-collar worlds: the postbellum middle class	258	(40)
Epilogue: City, town, village, farm -- the geography of class in nineteenth-century America	298	(13)
Notes	311	(78)
Bibliography	389	(35)
Index	424