Labor history at the crossroads: the mid-life crisis of working-class studies in america

Abstract

Susan Porter Benson. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. xvi + 322 pp. Susan G. Davis. Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. 248 pp. Illus. Richard Jules Oestreicher. Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. xix + 263 pp. Robert A. Slayton. Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. xiv + 278 pp. The project of rewriting and reconceiving the development of the American working class is now barely two decades old. Yet advances in our knowledge have been considerable, just as the disciplinary boundaries fencing in the study of labor, once constructed of labor economics and bits and pieces from the outposts of history and sociology, have been broken down, expanding the possibilities for those concerned to take the working-class experience seriously. As these volumes reveal, urban studies, sociology, folklore and communications are now receptive to historical analyses of class formation, while much of the most innovative writing in historical inquiry addresses the nature of class relations.