Syllabus: HSTY2034

Week 8: The Rise of the New Nation

Lecture 1: The Sweep of Economic Change, 1800-1860
Lecture 2: The Growth of Democracy

Tutorial: Life in the Lowell Mills

Essential Reading:

Philip S. Foner, The Factory Girls: A Collection of Writings (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977), Introduction, xiii-xxv; "The Beauty of Factory Life," 19-25; "Factory Girls Expose the Beauty of Factory Life," 74-94; Documents Relating to the Ten-Hour Movement, 236-253 (Course Reader).

Questions:

Why did some mill girls argue for the benefits of factory life? Who are they addressing? What language and arguments do their critics use to assert contrary positions? How does each group represent itself? Do the two sides have anything in common?   Look at the picture of the mills, the Timetable and the Boarding House Regulations. What do you think life would have been like in the mills? Why do you think that the movement for a ten hour day failed? How did factory life in Lowell change over time?  

Further Reading: The Development of a Market Economy

Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Jeanne Boydston, Home And Work: Housework, Wages, And The Ideology Of Labor In The Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).

Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983).

Hurbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1977).

Stephen Innes, ed. Work And Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).

Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996).

Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society And Selfhood In American Thought, 1820-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York: 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986).

Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1978).

Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).