The US and the World in the Nineteenth Century - Perl-Rosenthal

Race, slavery, and abolition: a hemispheric perspective

Covers social history of antebellum slavery as well as intellectual history of race (with attention to the particular salience of the black/white color line in U.S.); includes comparisons to slave regimes elsewhere in the Western hemisphere. Also covers movements towards abolition and the aftermath of emancipation, with an emphasis on the international context and divergent experiences elsewhere in the hemisphere.

• Berlin, Ira, et al. Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (1992)
• Cecelski, David. The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (2001)
• Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988)
• Genovese, Eugene. Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974)
• Genovese, Eugene. From Rebellion to Revolution (1979)
• Holt, Thomas. Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (1977)
• Johnson, Michael P. and James Roark. Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (1984)
• Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)
• Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1981)
• Litwack, Leon. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (1961)
• Lorimer, D.A. Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in mid-nineteenth century (1978)
• Painter, Nell. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976)
• Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005)
• Scott, Rebecca J. Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (2005)
• Stewart, James B. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1976)

Politics: struggles for political and civil rights

Focuses on two major political movements in the nineteenth century West: the struggle in the first half of the nineteenth century for an expanded franchise and in the second half of the century for social/industrial democracy. Considers how these movements towards modern politics grew out of the eighteenth-century “democratic revolutions.” A portion of this topic considers political radicalism and its relationship to mainstream political movements in Europe and the U.S.

• Agulhon, Maurice. The Republican Experiment, 1848-1852 (1983)
• Beales, D. “The electorate before and after 1832: The right to vote, and the opportunity,” Parliamentary History 11 (1992).
• DuBois, Ellen. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement, 1848-1869 (1978)
• Fink, Leon. Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (1985)
• Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1969)
• Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (1955)
• Hofstadter, Richard. The Idea of a Party System (1969)
• Kerber, Linda. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (1998)
• Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986)
• Peterson, Merrill, ed. Democracy, Liberty, and Property: The State Constitutional Conventions of the 1820’s (1966)
• Schlesinger, Arthur. The Age of Jackson (1945)
• Siemann, W. “The revolutions of 1848-1850” in M. Fulbrook, ed., German History Since 1800 (1997)
• Sperber, Jonathan. The European Revolutions: 1848-1851 (1994)
• Tombs, R. France 1814-1914 (London, 1996).
• Van Young, E. The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-21 (2001)
• Watson, Harry. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (1990)
• Wetherall, C. “The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England,” AHR 100 (1955)
• Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984)
• Wilentz, Sean. Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005)
• Woodward, C. Vann. Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955)

Colonialism, nationalism, state-building

Traces the relationships that existed in the nineteenth century between colonialism (and Western expansion, in the U.S.), nationalism and state-building. Considers how U.S. expansion into the West and colonization overseas shaped U.S. nationalism. Also covers the general political and social consequences of Western expansion.

• Bayly, C.A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (2004)
• Blackbourn, David and Geoff Eley, eds., The Peculiarities of German History (1984)
• Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991)
• Deutsch, Sarah. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (1987)
• Dunkerley, J. (ed.). Studies in the Formation of the Nation-State in Latin America (2002)
• Gellner, Ernst. Nations and nationalism (Oxford, 1983).
• Hall, C., Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination (2002)
• Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and nationalism since 1780 (London, 1990).
• LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansionism, 1860-1898 (1963)
• Langley, Lester. The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 (1996)
• Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987)
• Lynch, J. The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808-1826 (1986) – INTRO/CONCL
• Mayer, Arno. The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981).
• Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004)
• Rodriguez, Jaime. The Independence of Spanish America (1998)
• Schulze, H. The course of German nationalism: from Frederick the Great to Bismarck 1763-1867 (1991)
• Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (1995)
• Wallace, Anthony F.C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (1993)

Economic globalization and social transformation

This topic covers the transformation of the U.S. economy and the responses of society and politics to these changes. It begins with readings on the increasing integration of the U.S. into a global economic system, covering the transportation, market and industrial revolutions throughout the West. Then considers, in comparative context, the social groups especially affected by these changes—wage workers, slaves, women, the middle classes—responded to them. This section will devote particular attention to the social roots of political reform and religious reform movements.

• Beckert, Sven. Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie 1850-1896 (2001)
• Blackbourn, David. Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village (1995)
• Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (1990)
• Clark, Christopher. Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (1990)
• Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment (1978)
• Hahn, Steven. Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (1983)
• Hilton, Boyd. The age of atonement: the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought ca. 1785-1865 (1988)
• Hobsbawm, Age of Capital (1975)
• Johnson, Paul. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium
• McManners, John. Church and State in France 1870-1914 (1972)
• Ryan, Mary. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, NY, 1790-1865 (1981)
• Segalen, Martine. Love and Power in the Peasant Family in 19th C. France (1984)
• Sellers, Charles G. The Market Revolution, 1815-1860 (1991)
• Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986)
• Stedman Jones, Gareth, “Rethinking Chartism” in Languages of Class (1984)
• Taylor, Barbara. Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the 19th C. (1993)
• Teich, Mikulas and Roy Porter, eds. The Industrial Revolution in National Context. Europe and the USA (1996)
• Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
• Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian England (1992)
• Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth Century England (2004)
• Weber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (1976)
• Zakim, Michael. Ready-Made Democracy (2003)