Working Class Debt in the Late Nineteenth Century United States

1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elyce Rotella ◽  
George Alter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Distress ◽  
Economic Strategies ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Life Cycle Patterns ◽  
Near Future

Children's wages played a central role in family economic strategies in the late nineteenth century. The family budgets collected by the U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1889-1890 show that life-cycle patterns of savings and debt varied by industry depending upon incomes from children. The consumption patterns of families whose expenditures exceeded their incomes do not show signs of economic distress, and most families whose annual budget was in deficit could expect larger contributions from children in the near future. These patterns suggest that families used borrowing and saving to smooth consumption over the life-cycle as the earning capacity of the family changed.

State, Market, and Popular Sovereignty in Agrarian North America

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-199
Author(s):  
Christopher Clark
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Productive Capacity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
American Political Economy

This essay focuses on agriculture and particularly the “freehold ideal” of independent farmers in the nineteenth-century United States. An odd contradiction of American territorial settlement was the farmers’ simultaneous drive to exploit resources for the market and the aim of many of those actively engaged in settlement to shield themselves from the market’s dangers by acquiring land on the frontier. Clark shows how the ideal of freehold farming, which was so central to the American political economy, was actually threatened not so much from the dangers of the market overwhelming the small farm as from the family farm running out of labor to uphold its own productive capacity. Labor, not land, was the problem confronting the freehold vision, as he argues in a provocative re-reading of late nineteenth-century small farmers’ calls for state intervention.

scholarly journals ‘What a Wonderful Change Have I Undergone…So Altered in Stature, Knowledge & Ideas!’: Apprenticeship, Adolescence and Growing Up in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ulster

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leanne Calvert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Young People ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Until the late nineteenth century, apprenticeship was the main way in which young people were trained in crafts and trades. Given that most apprenticeship terms lasted approximately seven years, young people could expect to spend a large part of their youth in service to another. Apprenticeship therefore coincided with an important phase in the life cycle of many young men (and women) during this period. A study of apprenticeship not only tells us how young people learned the skills with which they made their future living, it also casts light on the process of ‘growing up’. However, we still know little about the everyday lives of apprentices, their relationships with their masters, and how young people themselves understood the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Drawing largely on the diary of John Tennent (1772–1813), a grocer’s apprentice who kept a record of his time spent in service, this article aims to broaden our understanding of these themes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. It demonstrates that, for young middle-class men like Tennent, apprenticeship played a key role in the transition from boy to manhood.

Intergenerational Occupational Mobility across Three Continents

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago Pérez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Intergenerational Mobility ◽  
Occupational Mobility ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

I compare rates of intergenerational occupational mobility across four countries in the late nineteenth century: 1869–1895 Argentina, 1850–1880 United States, 1851–1881 Britain, and 1865–1900 Norway. Argentina and the United States had similar levels of intergenerational mobility, and these levels were above those of Britain and Norway. These findings suggest that the higher mobility of nineteenth-century United States relative to Britain might not have been a reflection of “American exceptionalism,” but rather a manifestation of more widespread differences between settler economies of the New World and Europe.

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