It was a relentless circle of brutal exploitation in which the salt raked by Mary Prince and other enslaved people was sold to northern fishermen who sold it back southward in the form of salted fish with which to feed the enslaved who raked the salt.

Centering material culture when researching those with scant documentary evidence of their lives can help fill in the gaps of their experience.

Brothel guides tended to be small, making them easy to conceal. They also mimicked other types of publications to make it easier to hide the guides’ true purpose.

Precisely because images were so extensively braided into the milieu, their distinctive handlings of Americans in need or suddenly having to do with less—in other words, what these images did and did not show—were important in defining the Republic between the Revolution and the Civil War.

By the end of the 1820s, Skidmore’s experiences in the workplace and at the polls led him to connect the revolutionary legacy of 1776 to a biting critique of the economic hierarchies that continued to structure society.

The painting suggests a work environment so deplorable that even the skilled, sober-minded, American-born workers have walked out.

America’s ambivalence about labor is nothing new. In the colonial era the ruling class had nothing but contempt for anything that could be justly called “work.”

Skilled slaves, North and South, worked in nearly every craft … but the fruits of their labor are often unmarked or uncritically attributed to their masters.

Baltimore grew into America’s third-largest city in these years, and that growth was fueled by runaway slaves and white men driven to the city by changes in rural agriculture as much as by immigration from abroad.

The commodification of intimacy has long worried the bourgeoisie, which otherwise enjoyed the fruits of the widening web of commercial exchange.

Sedgwick’s evolving ideas about her children’s natures and her ability to shape them reflected an emerging American skepticism of the perfectibility of the individual and society at large, and an increasing emphasis on the determining power of innate characteristics.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

How did the returned gaze of Chinese laborers function in relation to envisioned awareness of industrial speed?

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

We ought to be asking ourselves what kind of democracy we want and what kind of democracy a particular leader or movement is offering.

“Encouraged by ideological constructions of clerking as an apprenticeship leading to mercantile proprietorship, clerks often found their hopes frustrated by obstinate realities.”

By the 1830s, Americans more confidently adopted a modern notion of the self—made through purely individualistic means in the market—and obscured its formation through familial, communal, and national ties.

In this wonderful snapshot of the relationship between economic systems and social hierarchies in eighteenth-century New York, Serena Zabin offers […]

“Skin and Bones” invites visitors to contemplate what tattoos meant to the sailors who made the decision to use their skin as a canvas.

As an undergraduate at Wake Forest University, I joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. While I appreciated little of the […]

My primary goal was to understand how impressment worked, not to settle once and for all the question of “how bad was it?”

Obsessed with status, revolutionary gentlemen aimed to strengthen their newly acquired political authority by promoting social, cultural, and economic practices and associations that emphasized hierarchy and obedience in the 1780s.

In this erudite, thoughtful, and at times sparkling study, Simon Newman—author of noteworthy earlier books on festive culture in the […]

Pawning past and present

Sailors were not really supposed to sleep. They were supposed to work.

Nineteenth century social and economic knowledge at once functioned as an instrument of capitalism while also serving as a tool for minimizing capitalism’s most disturbing consequences.

As the crisis intensified, the notion that each man assumed responsibility for his economic fate seemed increasingly flawed. Everyone, that is, was ready to claim credit for prosperity; none were willing to confess to personal failure.

Accounting was not an orderly process, but rather a vigorous and open-ended mixing and remixing of information.

A close examination of Josiah Warren’s utopian form of currency.

“I had seen lots of sheets like this in New England museums but I never expected to find one in a research library. I was tempted to unfold it to its full length just to see the reaction of the sober scholars seated at the polished tables around me.”

Who, in our own post-postmodern age, would dare to ask a question as simple as: What does America mean?

The high cost of being poor in America

Whalers yearned for family members, wished for love and sex, drank and caroused in ports, and longed to prosper from any great catch.

Greenberg’s unique angle nicely complements the existing literature on working-class households and labor activism, yet it will simultaneously force scholars of the period to rethink their entire approach to investigating working men.

Enslaved Virginians’ persistent attempts to acquire their personal liberty shaped nearly every discussion of taxes and military service.

This stamp pattern book opens up a rare glimpse into a small nineteenth-century American business, revealing just how many designs one man produced in his lifetime.

This article is presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

“Who or what gave these metals . . . their peculiar qualities for serving as coined money?” asked A Currency Primer of 1896. “Men did not,” came the answer. “Law did not. Government could not. It was done by Nature.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“History 263 reverts back three centuries in a kind of Rip Van Winkle in reverse! Freshly awakened, students inhabit the seventeenth century, not the twenty-first.”

Economic history still has something to tell us.

What’s old is new again

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Nineteenth-century capitalists were frantic system builders, not because of any innate personality trait or some vague ethical imperative handed down by the Protestant Reformation, but because they had destroyed the existing foundations of social order in their rise to power.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Urban Crucible and some of Nash’s articles from the 1970s provided a model of how crucial and previously unknown details of the lives of ordinary people could be extracted from dry-as-dust tax lists, account books, and the like, and used to tell a new story of how the colonial city worked.”

Rice argues that contemporary debates about popular physiology utilized a metaphor that bodies acted as machines and therefore created the notion that all people were natural machine operators.

Friend clearly sets out to engage in the debate over the transition to capitalism in early America.

    Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana | Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New […]

At the very least Linebaugh and Rediker break the tradition of treating mixed-race love as purely exploitative and herein lift such a union into a brave act of defiance.

Appleby’s Americans did not fight the Revolution, nor apparently remember it, nor even spend much time celebrating or thinking about what had happened to the previous generation. Rather, they took the Revolution’s fruits–and ran toward a new future.

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