What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?

Abstract

What Makes History of Capitalism Newsworthy? Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of NineteenthCentury America. Edited by Michael Zakim and Gary J. Komblith. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. viii + 358. Cloth, $97.00; paper $32.00.)Capitalism may be in crisis as an economic system, but it is thriving as a subject within historical profession. The of now organizes a book series at Columbia University Press, a seminar program at Newberry Library, a MOOC at Cornell University, a graduate field at University of Georgia, and a tenure line at Brown University. Undergraduate courses on American capitalism are filling lecture halls at Princeton, Florida, and Loyola University Chicago, while New School for Social Research has launched its Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. The topic has provided thematic unity to recent annual meetings of Social Science History Association and Organization of American Historians. American Historical Association's state-of-the-field volume American History Now, of capitalism stands alongside established subfields like women's and cultural history. A front-page article last year in New York Times carried headline, In History Class, Capitalism Sees Its Stock Soar.1 is news? one could hear many early republic historians ask with incredulity. The study of capitalism has long been a central concern of our field. Forty years ago, labor history began recovering experiences of first generation of American wage laborers in communities like Paterson, Rockdale, and Lowell. Very soon, artisans of every trade had a historian to recount their declining economic power in face of capitalism's rise. Graduate students in 1980s cut their teeth on farmers' account books and rural mentalites, and few qualifying exam lists lacked a section on the transition to debate. The generation coming of age in 1990s had the market revolution looming over its head, and in wake of a Journal of Early Republic special issue on capitalism in 1996, social historians continued to argue with Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby over compatibility of capitalism and democracy. Over last decade, SHEAR conferences have featured sessions on capitalism as a force of liberation or destruction, as a top-down or bottom-up phenomenon, and as ideology or a structure. As often as not, experienced commentators have alerted younger presenters to classic works of Samuel Rezneck, Oscar and Mary Handlin, or George Rogers Taylor, extending field's historiographical genealogy ever deeper into past. If academic generations define themselves against their immediate predecessors, how many revisionist historians have humbly discovered that their scholarly grandparents had in fact been exploring same questions half a lifetime earlier? This new of capitalism might be a testament to good branding (appropriately) rather than original insight, less a field than a fad.Scholars identifying themselves with new of capitalismand I count myself in these ranks-make no pretense of having discovered a field. Many historians working under this rubric are quick to credit their undergraduate teachers and graduate advisors: Elizabeth Blackmar, Barbara Fields, and Eric Foner at Columbia, or JeanChristophe Agnew and Michael Denning at Yale, to name only two clusters of influential faculty who have been talking about capitalism for decades. For those interested in parlor games, younger historians of capitalism can reach Agnew or Blackmar in about half steps required to get to Kevin Bacon. Columbiaand Yale-trained students have been at forefront of institutionalizing of capitalism elsewhere; none with more success than Sven Beckert, whose Program on Study of Capitalism at Harvard has placed recent graduates into faculty positions at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, UC-Berkeley, Cornell University, and University of Pennsylvania. …