Institutions and political change: Working-class formation in England and the United States, 1820–1896

1992 ◽  
pp. 155-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria C. Hattam
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Formation

Red History, Blue Mood: Labor History and Solidarity in an Age of Fragmentation

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jefferson Cowie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Political Fragmentation ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Control ◽  
Class Community

Beginning with labor historians’ efforts to create a synthesis of the field in the 1980s, this essay explores the problem of working-class political fragmentation and the intellectual problems that posed for the generation of “new” labor historians. Looking to culture, class, community, and control as their themes, historians overlooked deeper problems in American class formation as well as the monumental complexity of discussing the history of class in the United States.

Public Schooling and Working-Class Formation: The Case of the United States

1982 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Katznelson ◽  
Kathleen Gille ◽  
Margaret Weir
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Public Schooling

Class formation and capitalism. A second look at a classic

1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret R. Somers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Full Extent ◽  
Second Look ◽  
The Individual

Studies of class-formation have long been dominated by an espitemology of absensethe study of the absence of Marx's predicted revolutionary class consciousness among the Western working class. Katznelson's and Zolberg's pathbreaking Working-Class Formation: Ninetenth-century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (1986) posed a major challenge to this tradition. Instead of being seen as deviant or exceptional, moreover, the individual cases of class formation are analysed as variations that can only be explained by each nation's pattern of historicalprimarily politicalformation. An instant classic, Working-Class Formation has not to date been surpassed by subsequent studies. This essay reviews the strenghts and the weaknesses of this classic volume, suggesting in the final analysis that it does not quite realize the full extent of its radical implications.

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