The Making of the English Middle Class

The Making of the English Middle Class PDF

Author: Peter Earle

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1989-01-01

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780520068261

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This is the first major study of a neglected yet extremely significant subject: the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730, a period in which they created a society and economy that can be seen with hindsight to have ushered in the modern world. Using a wealth of material from contemporary sources--including wills, business papers, inventories, marriage contracts, divorce hearings, and the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys--Peter Earle presents a fully rounded picture of the "middling sort of people," getting to the hearts of their lives as men and women struggling for success in the biggest, richest, and most middle-class city in contemporary Europe. He examines in fascinating and convincing detail the business life of Londoners, from apprenticeship through the problems and potential rewards of different occupational groups, going on to look at middle-class family, social, political and material life--from relationships with spouses, children, servants, and neighbors, to food and clothes and furniture, to sickness, death, and burial. Stimulating, scholarly, and constantly illuminating, this book is an important and impressive contribution to English social history.

The Making of the English Working Class

The Making of the English Working Class PDF

Author: Edward Palmer Thompson

Publisher: IICA

Published: 1964

Total Pages: 866

ISBN-13:

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This account of artisan and working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, adds an important dimension to our understanding of the nineteenth century. E.P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and re-creates the whole life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation and who yet created a culture and political consciousness of great vitality.

The Making of the English Working Class

The Making of the English Working Class PDF

Author: E. P. Thompson

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2016-03-15

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 1504022173

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A history of the common people and the Industrial Revolution: “A true masterpiece” and one of the Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the twentieth century (Tribune). During the formative years of the Industrial Revolution, English workers and artisans claimed a place in society that would shape the following centuries. But the capitalist elite did not form the working class—the workers shaped their own creations, developing a shared identity in the process. Despite their lack of power and the indignity forced upon them by the upper classes, the working class emerged as England’s greatest cultural and political force. Crucial to contemporary trends in all aspects of society, at the turn of the nineteenth century, these workers united into the class that we recognize all across the Western world today. E. P. Thompson’s magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class defined early twentieth-century English social and economic history, leading many to consider him Britain’s greatest postwar historian. Its publication in 1963 was highly controversial in academia, but the work has become a seminal text on the history of the working class. It remains incredibly relevant to the social and economic issues of current times, with the Guardian saying upon the book’s fiftieth anniversary that it “continues to delight and inspire new readers.”

The Making of the Middle Class

The Making of the Middle Class PDF

Author: A. Ricardo López

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2012-01-18

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 0822351293

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The contributors question the current academic understanding of what is known as the global middle class. They see middle-class formation as transnational and they examine this group through the lenses of economics, gender, race, and religion from the mid-nineteenth century to today.

The Making of the British Middle Class?

The Making of the British Middle Class? PDF

Author: Alan J. Kidd

Publisher: Alan Sutton Publishing

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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The contributors to this volume examine the history of the British middle classes from the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Geography, economy and occupation recur as factors contributing to differentiation between middling social groups. At the same time, the authors explore the significance for social and political behaviour of shared forms of identity, including a range of cultural practices - religion, voluntary activities and local cultural networks, the cultivation of professional status, education and the language of the press - and their organization and institutional forms: churches, schools, newspapers, voluntary and charitable associations and professional bodies. These several accounts raise broader theoretical and historiographical debates, not least about the vexed question of class, which are discussed and contextualized by the editors.

Sport and the English Middle Classes, 1870-1914

Sport and the English Middle Classes, 1870-1914 PDF

Author: John Lowerson

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 9780719046513

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This book examines the phenomena which explain the boom in sport among the middle classes in late Victorian England. The author focuses on the extent to which sport became an agent of the development of the middle classes and an instrument of their self-definition. The book does not set out to explain the making of the English middle classes; rather, it examines a significant part of that making.

Family Fortunes

Family Fortunes PDF

Author: Leonore Davidoff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 609

ISBN-13: 1135144052

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Family Fortunes has become a seminal text in class and gender history. Published to wide critical acclaim in 1987, its influence in the field continues to be extensive. It has cast new light on the perception of middle-class society and gender relations between 1780 and 1850. This revised edition contains a substantial new introduction, placing the original survey in its historiographical context. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall evaluate the readings their text has received and broaden their study by taking into account recent developments and shifts in the field. They apply current perceptions of history to their original project, and see new motives and meanings emerge that reinforce their argument.

Cradle of the Middle Class

Cradle of the Middle Class PDF

Author: Mary P. Ryan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780521274036

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Winner of the 1981 Bancroft Prize. Focusing primarily on the middle class, this study delineates the social, intellectual and psychological transformation of the American family from 1780-1865. Examines the emergence of the privatized middle-class family with its sharp division of male and female roles.

American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability

American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability PDF

Author: Robert Wuthnow

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0691210713

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How American respectability has been built by maligning those who don't make the grade How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply? The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—“misfits”—who deviated from accepted norms. Robert Wuthnow argues that respectability is constructed by “othering” people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. He demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering. Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the “othering” that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.