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From Market-Places to a Market Economy
Through innovative use of little used archival material, Rothenberg finds that the relevant economic magnitudes - farm commodity prices, wages for day and monthly farm labor, and the determinants of rural wealth holding - behaved as if they had been formed in a market. This ground breaking discovery reveals how an agricultural economy that lacked both an important export staple and technological change could experience market-led growth. To understand this impressive economic development, Rothenberg discusses a number of provocative questions.
Town Born
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British colonists found the New World full of resources. With land readily available but workers in short supply, settlers developed coercive forms of labor—indentured servitude and chattel slavery—in order to produce staple export crops like rice, wheat, and tobacco. This brutal labor regime became common throughout most of the colonies. An important exception was New England, where settlers and their descendants did most work themselves. In Town Born, Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, Ne...
Farmers and Fishermen
Daniel Vickers examines the shifting labor strategies used by colonists as New England evolved from a string of frontier settlements to a mature society on the brink of industrialization. Lacking a means to purchase slaves or hire help, seventeenth-centur
Calvinists Incorporated
Bringing immigrants onstage as central players in the drama of rural capitalist transformation, Anne Kelly Knowles traces a community of Welsh immigrants to Jackson and Gallia counties in southern Ohio. After reconstructing the gradual process of community-building, Knowles focuses on the pivotal moment when the immigrants became involved with the industrialization of their new region as workers and investors in Welsh-owned charcoal iron companies. Setting the southern Ohio Welsh in the context of Welsh immigration as a whole from 1795 to 1850, Knowles explores how these strict Calvinists responded to the moral dilemmas posed by leaving their native land and experiencing economic success in the United States. Knowles draws on a wide variety of sources, including obituaries and community histories, to reconstruct the personal histories of over 1,700 immigrants. The resulting account will find appreciative readers not only among historical geographers, but also among American economic historians and historians of religion.
Sowing the American Dream
From 1840 to 1900, midwestern Americans experienced firsthand the profound economic, cultural, and structural changes that transformed the nation from a premodern, agrarian state to one that was urban, industrial, and economically interdependent. Midwestern commercial farmers found themselves at the heart of these changes. Their actions and reactions led to the formation of a distinctive and particularly democratic consumer ethos, which is still being played out today. By focusing on the consumer behavior of midwestern farmers, Sowing the American Dream provides illustrative examples of how Americans came to terms with the economic and ideological changes that swirled around them. From the formation of the Grange to the advent of mail-order catalogs, the buying patterns of rural midwesterners set the stage for the coming century. Carefully documenting the rise and fall of the powerful purchasing cooperatives, David Blanke explains the shifting trends in collective consumerism, which ultimately resulted in a significant change in the way that midwestern consumers pursued their own regional identity, community, and independence.
Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790-1860
In Southern Society and Its Transformations, a new set of scholars challenge conventional perceptions of the antebellum South as an economically static region compared to the North. Showing that the pre-Civil War South was much more complex than once thought, the essays in this volume examine the economic lives and social realities of three overlooked but important groups of southerners: the working poor, non-slaveholding whites, and middling property holders such as small planters, professionals, and entrepreneurs. The nine essays that comprise Southern Society and Its Transformations explore new territory in the study of the slave-era South, conveying how modernization took shape across th...
Divided Loyalties
"A novel study. Mass politics are central to our century, and Gelvin brings them to life in a readable narrative. This book adds a new dimension to an ongoing and important debate in the field."—Leila Fawaz, author of An Occasion for War
Manufacturing Advantage
Ultimately, the book reveals the complex link between government intervention and private initiative in a country struggling to create a political economy that balanced military competence with commercial needs.
Capitalism Takes Command
Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America’s transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, Capitalism Takes Command presents a history of family farming, general incorporation laws, mortgage payments, inheritance practices, office systems, and risk management—an inventory of the means by which capitalism became America’s new revolutionary tradition. This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past. As business ceaselessly revised its own practices, a new demographic of private bankers, insurance brokers, investors in securities, and start-up manufacturers, among many others, assumed center stage, displacing older elites and forms of property. Explaining how capital became an “ism” and how business became a political philosophy, Capitalism Takes Command brings the economy back into American social and cultural history.
Johnny Appleseed
“Finally, the cliché is peeled away and the essence of this utterly American character is so revealing. John Chapman comes alive here and it is a thrilling experience to escape the specific gravity of the decades of myth” (Ken Burns). This portrait of Johnny Appleseed restores the flesh-and-blood man beneath the many myths. It captures the boldness of an iconic American and the sadness of his last years, as the frontier marched past him, ever westward. And it shows how death liberated the legend and made of Johnny a barometer of the nation’s feelings about its own heroic past and the supposed Eden it once had been. Howard Means does for America’s inner frontier what Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage did for its western one.
