Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States

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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My Little Girl Wife

American Child Bride ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469629537.003.0006 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Nicholas L. Syrett

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Nineteenth Century ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

The United States ◽

Child Marriage ◽

Statutory Rape ◽

Age Of Consent ◽

Minor Children ◽

Meaningful Category

By the later nineteenth century, ideas about childhood and about marriage had undergone significant transformations in the United States, especially among the middle class. Children were now seen as innocents in need of protection and marriage was meant to be a complementary (if still unequal) union of two companionate souls. Both of these trends meant that child marriage increasingly came into disfavor. Focusing on depictions of child marriage in newspapers, debates about statutory rape laws, and marriage and divorce reform leagues, this chapter documents succesful efforts to raise the age of consent to marriage. It also shows the ways that working-class parents, generally those least likely to identify age as a meaningful category of identity, used these new laws to prevent their minor children from marrying.

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Shund and the Tabloids: Jewish Popular Reading in Inter-War Poland

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 16 ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781874774730.003.0011 ◽

2003 ◽

pp. 188-212

Author(s):

Nathan Cohen

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Western Europe ◽

The United States ◽

The West ◽

Tabloid Press

This chapter describes Jewish popular reading in inter-war Poland, looking at shund and the Polish tabloid press. In the first third of the twentieth century, as the Polish press was developing rapidly, sensationalist newspapers began to proliferate. While this type of press had been widespread in the United States and western Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century, it first emerged in Poland only in 1910, with Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Illustrated Daily Courier) in Kraków. In Warsaw, the first tabloid newspapers, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny (Information and Telegraphic Courier) and Ekspres Poranny (Morning Express), appeared in 1922. In 1926, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny changed its name, now printed in red, to Kurier Czerwony (Red Courier). In time, the colour red became emblematic of sensationalist newspapers in Poland, and they were nicknamed czerwoniaki (Reds), similar to the ‘yellow’ press in the West.

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

Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas ◽

10.1215/15476715-7790246 ◽

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.

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