Summary[]
This book examines the making and meaning of “middle class” as a special aspect of American social development as part of city life, urbanization, and American industrial-capitalist development in the 19th century. Americans of middling economic and social position “were formed and formed themselves into a relatively coherent and ascending middle class during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.” Blumin reformulates middle class formation in terms of the types of social and cultural experience – work, consumption, residential location, formal and informal voluntary association, and family organization and strategy. He contends that particular developments in the 19th century and particularly after the Civil War – widening differences between non-manual and manual work, the expansion of middle class suburbanization, and the resumption and expansion of social and economic conflict phrased in class terms – contributed to the articulation of the American middle class. During the Jacksonian era and in urban centers, non-manual and manual functions were separated in artisan shops, white collar neighborhoods formed, a distinct middle-class home became recognizable by particular artifacts, and new patterns of associations emerged among white collar individuals.
Example: The changing nature of artisan shops, factories, and retails showrooms and the development of a middle class took shape in architecture and spatial arrangements, the incomes, wealth, and mobility patterns of workers and proprietors. For example, non-manual businessmen and clerks made more money than skilled workers and accumulated more property. As a result, non-manual and manual sectors of antebellum cities diverged economically between men who worked with their heads and mean who worked with their hands (Republican prejudice).
See also: Jeanne Boydston, Charles Sellers, Christopher Clark