Scraping By

Scraping By
Author: Seth Rockman
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2009-01-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801899990

Co-winner, 2010 Merle Curti Award, Organization of American HistoriansWinner, 2010 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, ILR School at Cornell University and the Labor and Working-Class History AssociationWinner, 2010 H. L. Mitchell Award, Southern Historical Association Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end labor market in post-Revolutionary Baltimore. Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Rockman’s research includes construction site payrolls, employment advertisements, almshouse records, court petitions, and the nation’s first “living wage” campaign. These rich accounts of day laborers and domestic servants illuminate the history of early republic capitalism and its consequences for working families.

Bawdy City

Bawdy City
Author: Katie M. Hemphill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2020-01-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 110848901X

A vivid social history of Baltimore's prostitution trade and its evolution throughout the nineteenth century, Bawdy City centers woman in a story of the relationship between sexuality, capitalism, and law. Beginning in the colonial period, prostitution was little more than a subsistence trade. However, by the 1840s, urban growth and changing patterns of household labor ushered in a booming brothel industry. The women who oversaw and labored within these brothels were economic agents surviving and thriving in an urban world hostile to their presence. With the rise of urban leisure industries and policing practices that spelled the end of sex establishments, the industry survived for only a few decades. Yet, even within this brief period, brothels and their residents altered the geographies, economy, and policies of Baltimore in profound ways. Hemphill's critical narrative of gender and labor shows how sexual commerce and debates over its regulation shaped an American city.

Early Republic

Early Republic
Author: Andrew K. Frank
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2008-12-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1598840207

In a compilation of essays, Early Republic: People and Perspectives explores the varied experiences of many different groups of Americans across racial, gender, religious, and regional lines in the early years of the country. Written by expert contributors drawing on extensive new research, Early Republic: People and Perspectives ranges across the broad spectrum of society to explore the everyday lives of Americans from the birth of the nation to the beginning of Jacksonian Age (roughly 1830). In a series of chapters, Early Republic provides vivid portraits of the farmers, entrepreneurs, laborers, women, Native Americans, and slaves who made up the population of the United States in its infancy. Key events, such as the two-party political system, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and the expansion into the Ohio Valley, are seen through the eyes of the ordinary citizens who helped make them happen, in turn, making the United States what it is today.

On the Make

On the Make
Author: Brian P. Luskey
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2011-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0814753108

In the bustling cities of the mid-nineteenth-century Northeast, young male clerks working in commercial offices and stores were on the make, persistently seeking wealth, respect, and self-gratification. Yet these strivers and "counter jumpers" discovered that claiming the identities of independent men—while making sense of a volatile capitalist economy and fluid urban society—was fraught with uncertainty. In On the Make, Brian P. Luskey illuminates at once the power of the ideology of self-making and the important contests over the meanings of respectability, manhood, and citizenship that helped to determine who clerks were and who they would become. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, including clerks’ diaries, newspapers, credit reports, census data, advice literature, and fiction, Luskey argues that a better understanding of clerks and clerking helps make sense of the culture of capitalism and the society it shaped in this pivotal era.

The Working Poor

The Working Poor
Author: David K. Shipler
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2008-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307493407

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Arab and Jew, an intimate portrait unfolds of working American families struggling against insurmountable odds to escape poverty. "This is clearly one of those seminal books that every American should read and read now." —The New York Times Book Review As David K. Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology—hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor—white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy. This impassioned book not only dissects the problems, but makes pointed, informed recommendations for change. It is a book that stands to make a difference.

How Welfare Worked in the Early United States

How Welfare Worked in the Early United States
Author: Gabriel J. Loiacono
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0197515452

What was American welfare like in George Washington's day? It was expensive, extensive, and run by local governments. Known as "poor relief," it included what we would now call welfare and social work. Unlike other aspects of government, poor relief remained consistent in structure between the establishment of the British colonies in the 1600s and the New Deal of the 1930s. In this book, Gabriel J. Loiacono follows the lives of five people in Rhode Island between the Revolutionary War and 1850: a long-serving overseer of the poor, a Continental Army veteran who was repeatedly banished from town, a nurse who was paid by the government to care for the poor, an unwed mother who cared for the elderly, and a paralyzed young man who attempted to become a Christian missionary from inside of a poorhouse. Of Native, African, and English descent, these five Rhode Islanders utilized poor relief in various ways. Tracing their involvement with these programs, Loiacono explains the importance of welfare through the first few generations of United States history. In Washington's day, poor relief was both generous and controlling. Two centuries ago, Americans paid for--and many relied on--an astonishing governmental system that provided food, housing, and medical care to those in need. This poor relief system also shaped American households and dictated where Americans could live and work. Recent generations have assumed that welfare is a new development in the United States. This book shows how old welfare is in the United States of America through five little-known, but compelling, life stories.

Schooling Citizens

Schooling Citizens
Author: Hilary J. Moss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2010-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226542513

While white residents of antebellum Boston and New Haven forcefully opposed the education of black residents, their counterparts in slaveholding Baltimore did little to resist the establishment of African American schools. Such discrepancies, Hilary Moss argues, suggest that white opposition to black education was not a foregone conclusion. Through the comparative lenses of these three cities, she shows why opposition erupted where it did across the United States during the same period that gave rise to public education. As common schooling emerged in the 1830s, providing white children of all classes and ethnicities with the opportunity to become full-fledged citizens, it redefined citizenship as synonymous with whiteness. This link between school and American identity, Moss argues, increased white hostility to black education at the same time that it spurred African Americans to demand public schooling as a means of securing status as full and equal members of society. Shedding new light on the efforts of black Americans to learn independently in the face of white attempts to withhold opportunity, Schooling Citizens narrates a previously untold chapter in the thorny history of America’s educational inequality.

Widows and Orphans First

Widows and Orphans First
Author: S. J. Kleinberg
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252091639

The experiences of widows and their children during the Progressive Era and the New Deal depended on differences in local economies and values. How did these widely varied experiences impact the origins of the welfare state? S. J. Kleinberg delves into the question by comparing widows' lives in three industrial cities with differing economic, ethnic, and racial bases. Government in Fall River, Massachusetts, saw employment as a solution to widows' poverty and as a result drastically limited public charity. In Pittsburgh, widows received sympathetic treatment. Few jobs existed for them or their children; indeed, the jobs for men were concentrated in "widowmaking" industries like steel and railroading. With a large African American population and a diverse economy that relied on inexpensive child and female labor, Baltimore limited funds for public services. African Americans adapted by establishing their own charitable institutions. A fascinating comparative study, Widows and Orphans First offers a one-of-a-kind look at social welfare policy for widows and the role of children in society during a pivotal time in American history.