These rich accounts of day laborers and domestic servants illuminate the history of early republic capitalism and its consequences for working families. Rockman's research includes construction site payrolls, almshouse records, court petitions, employment advertisements, and the nation's first "living wage" campaign.

By focusing his study on this boomtown, Rockman reassesses the roles of race and region and rewrites the history of class and capitalism in the United States during this time. Their labor was indispensable to the early republic's market revolution, and it was central to the transformation of the United States into the wealthiest society in the Western world.

Seth rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, nativity, sex, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic. In the era of frederick douglass, Baltimore's distinctive economy featured many slaves who earned wages and white workers who performed backbreaking labor.

. Rockman describes the material experiences of low-wage workers -- how they found work, translated labor into food, fuel, and rent, and navigated underground economies and social welfare systems. Enslaved mariners, free black domestic servants, Irish dockhands, white seamstresses, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end labor market in post-Revolutionary Baltimore.

He also explores what happened if they failed to find work or lost their jobs. Rockman argues that the American working class emerged from the everyday struggles of these low-wage workers.

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

Expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War. River of dark dreams places the cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.

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Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, powerful, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, urban, and fascinating as a novel. Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe.

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Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

Soul by soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.

Taking us inside the new orleans slave market, priced, and slaves, and children were packaged, women, where 100, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, and sold, the largest in the nation, buyers, 000 men, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each.

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The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America Politics and Society in Modern America Book 64

Midcentury repression was not a sudden response to newly visible gay subcultures, Canaday demonstrates, but the culmination of a much longer and slower process of state-building during which the state came to know and to care about homosexuality across many decades. Social, and legal history at their most compelling, political, The Straight State explores how regulation transformed the regulated: in drawing boundaries around national citizenship, the state helped to define the very meaning of homosexuality in America.

Canaday argues that the state's gradual awareness of homosexuality intensified during the later New Deal and through the postwar period as policies were enacted that explicitly used homosexuality to define who could enter the country, serve in the military, and collect state benefits. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today.

She begins at the turn of the twentieth century when the state first stumbled upon evidence of sex and gender nonconformity, violence, revealing how homosexuality was policed indirectly through the exclusion of sexually "degenerate" immigrants and other regulatory measures aimed at combating poverty, and vice.

The straight state is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Canaday looks at three key arenas of government control--immigration, the military, and welfare--and demonstrates how federal enforcement of sexual norms emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state.

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Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America

Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success. A finalist for the pulitzer Prize: "A powerful book, crowded with telling details and shrewd observations. Michael kazin, new york times book ReviewThis original, deeply researched history shows the transcontinentals to be pivotal actors in the making of modern America.

But the triumphal myths of the golden spike, robber barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here.

CITY OF WOMEN: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860

And we have, as well, a radically illuminating depiction of a class conflict in which the dialectic of female vice and virtue was a central issue. City of women is a prime work of scholarship, the first full-scale work by a major new voice in the fields of American and urban history. In this brilliant and vivid study of life in new york city during the years between the creation of the republic and the Civil War, a distinguished historian explores the position of men and women in both the poor and middle classes, the conflict between women of the laboring poor and those of the genteel classes who tried to help them and the ways in which laboring women traced out unforeseen possibilities for themselves in work and in politics.

Christine stansell shows how a new concept of womanhood took shape in america as middle-class women constituted themselves the moral guardians of their families and of the nation, cut adrift from the family ties that both sustained and oppressed them, while poor workingwomen, of “woman’s place” and “woman’s nature, were subverting—through their sudden entry into the working and political worlds outside the home—the strict notions of female domesticity and propriety, ” that were central to the flowering and the image of bourgeois life in America.

Here we have a passionate and enlightening portrait of New York during the years in which it was becoming a center of world capitalist development, years in which it was evolving in dramatic ways, becoming the city it fundamentally is.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American ... and the University of North Carolina Press

Kathleen brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Brown's analysis extends through bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity.

This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. She demonstrates that, children, wives, despite elite planters' dominance, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.

In response to the presence of indians, and the insecurity of social rank, the shortage of labor, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia.

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From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation

In the era of slave emancipation no ideal of freedom had greater power than that of contract. Signifying self-ownership, and reciprocal exchange among formally equal individuals, volition, contract became the dominant metaphor for social relations and the very symbol of freedom. The antislavery claim was that the negation of chattel status lay in the contracts of wage labor and marriage.

Their arguments over the meaning of slavery and freedom were grounded in changing circumstances of labor and home life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. This 1999 book explores how a generation of american thinkers and reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, jurists, labor advocates, moralists, feminists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free society.

At the heart of these arguments lay the problem of defining which realms of self and social existence could be rendered market commodities and which could not.

This Vast Southern Empire

Most leaders of the U. S. Expansion in the years before the Civil War were southern slaveholders. As matthew karp shows, they were nationalists, not separatists. When lincoln’s election broke their grip on foreign policy, these elites formed their own Confederacy not merely to preserve their property but to shape the future of the Atlantic world.

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To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

This extraordinary biography of wal-mart's world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.