LitArk » Books » History

Edward Pessen (editor) - Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War

Here you can read online Edward Pessen (editor) - Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 1989, publisher: Routledge, genre: History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Book:
Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War
Author:
Edward Pessen editor
Publisher:
Routledge
Genre:
Books / History
Year:
1989
Rating:
3 / 5
Favourites:
Add to favourites
Your mark:
- 60
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5

Description
Author's other books
Similar books

Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Until publication of Riches, Classes, and Power, Alexis de Tocquervilles vision of the United States as a generally egalitarian nation predominated. While historians might quarrel about the social sources of egalitarianism, they did not dispute the soundness of the basic model; and Tocquevilles vision clearly dominated Americans sense of itself as well. A self-acknowledged congenital skeptic, Pessen decided to find out whether the facts of American life sustained Tocquevilles conclusions.

Riches, Class, and Power, represents more than five years intensive research on the wealth, family backgrounds, careers, marriages, residential patterns, uses of leisure, life-styles, social standing, and influence and power of the wealthy in four of the five largest cities in the United States before the Civil War. Pessen examines New York City, Philadelphia, Boston and the then-separate city of Brooklyn in the 1820s and 1840s. His claim is that the massive evidence on urban life of the time sharply refutes Tocquevilles thesis. A National Book Award finalist for history, Riches, Class, and Power undoubtedly helped reshape America before the Civil War.

In his reintroduction to this paperback edition, Pessen reviews the critical reaction, and reconsiders the extent to which its findings are applicable to the social structure of small or frontier towns of the period. He discusses whether unequal distribution of wealth in America results more from changes in historical circumstance or to shifts in demographic or age structure.

Edward Pessen (editor): author's other books

Who wrote Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

RICHES,
CLASS,
AND
POWER

America Before The Civil War

EDWARD
PESSEN

Published 1990 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 89-30494

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pessen, Edward, 1920

[Riches, class, and power before the Civil War]

Riches, class and power: America before the Civil War/Edward Pessen.

p. cm.

Reprint. Originally published: Riches, class, and power before the Civil War.

Lexington Mass.: Heath, 1973.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-88738-806-X

1. WealthUnited StatesHistory19th century. 2. Social mobility United StatesHistory19th century. 3. Social classesUnited States History19th century. I. Title.

[HC110.W4P47 1989]

305.5'23'09730903dc20

89-30494

CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-88738-806-4 (pbk)

To Adele

Contents

PART I
Wealth

PART II
Social Mobility

General Reflections on Social Mobility

PART III
Class

The Problem of Social Class

PART IV
Influence and Power

On Influence and Power

Introduction to the Transaction Edition

When the original version of this book was published sixteen years ago, Alexis de Tocquevilles image of an egalitarian America was taken as gospel by most American historians in their treatments of the United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. No book compared with Tocquevilles Democracy in America (part I published in 1835, part II in 1840) in its influence on the thinking of American scholars and public alike as to the nature of early nineteenth century American society.

In Tocquevilles social portrait, a general equality of condition was the central feature of American life. According to the brilliant young French aristocrat, there were no great fortunes in this youthful and vigorous nation because wealth was distributed almost equally among Americans. Blacks ands ome recently arrived Irish immigrants were the only ones not partaking of the cornucopia.

The rich in America were rich only in a manner of speaking, their fortunes supposedly not comparing in magnitude to those that had been accumulated by great wealthholders in Europe. Nor did wealthy Americans long hold on to their riches. Flux reigned in this kaleidoscopic milieu where men swiftly made, lost, and regained their fortunes in amazingly brief time. In Henry Clays catchy phrase, the rich in America were self-made men. In Tocquevilles memorable words, the American rich had felt the sting of want. Social classes or clusters of families whose wealth, standing, and influence set them apart from others did exist in America as elsewhere. But in the United States pictured by Tocqueville, class barriers were not firmly in place, class lines were easily and regularly breached, a democractic social mingling was the norm. Instead of the domination of society by the wealthy elites that ruled the Old World, commoners lorded over the New World. A tyranny of the majority prevailed in the United States, said Tocqueville. The people ruled over America, he observed, as does the Deity over the universe. And these were the words of a staunch Catholic.

American historians who might quarrel among themselves over the relative merits of Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster or about the validity of Turners frontier thesis, which explained American democracy and values as a byproduct of the nations moving western border, were in agreement that the United States before the Civil War was indeed an egalitarian society. Their chapters on social history (in their books of a generation ago and earlier, focusing as they typically did on national politics) were entitled, The Era of the Common Man, The Rise of Tom, Dick, and Harry, The Age of Equality, or other rubrics of similar character.

Not that acceptance of the egalitarian model was unanimous. A few studies pointed to pockets of poverty amidst the alleged plenty. Students of the antebellum South had to know that not only enslaved blacks but many free, poor whites were denied power, prestige, and the good things of life. My 1969 book,Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics, observed that the egalitarian version of American society rested on very little evidence. The sight of one prisoner shaking hands with a warden was enough to convince Tocqueville that his informants were right in telling him that in the United States, one mans son was as good as any others. The absence of beggars on the streets convinced other visitors that poverty was absent here. That the wealthiest man in America, John Jacob Astor, was the child of German parents of humble rank and modest circumstances was taken as proof that the race in America was won not by the well born, but by the hardworking and able, whatever their beginnings. In other words, the egalitarian version of pre-Civil War America was based not on substantial evidence but, rather, on snippets of evidence that were treated by Tocqueville and by most of his contemporaries, whether Americans or European visitors, as though they illuminated the society as a whole.

Tocqueville, whose best friends conceded that he had little interest in mere facts, simply concluded that a political democracy such as the United States had necessarily to be a social and economic democracy. His powers of deduction led him inevitably to the conclusion that the scattered examples of equality that he chanced to glimpse replicated the equality that ostensibly permeated the entire society. Boastful Americans, certain that their youthful society was superior to decadent Europes, were delighted to have their prideful feelings confirmed by a learned and prestigious source. Scholars, disinclined to challenge a theory so long in place and so consoling to believers in American exceptionalism, had convinced themselves that further research or additional evidence was hardly necessary to confirm what seemed to them the obviousthat the dynamic, democratic, pre-industrial United States was the closest approximation to a land of equality that the Western world had yet produced.

As a congenital skeptic, I remained unconvinced. Goaded by a colleague who, while applauding my observations in Jacksonian America on the thin evidentiary basis for the egalitarian thesis, nevertheless reminded me that I had not unearthed substantial evidence of my own, I decided to dig up that evidence and once and for all find out whether the facts of American life sustained Tocquevilles conclusions.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War»

Look at similar books to Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Kathleen Odell Korgen

Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity

Robert C. Smith

Power, Philosophy and Egalitarianism: Women, the Family and African Americans

Kevin Butterfield

The Making of Tocquevilles America: Law and Association in the Early United States

Robert Strausz-Hupé

Democracy and American Foreign Policy: Reflections on the Legacy of Tocqueville

Neil L. Shumsky

Social Structure and Social Mobility

Margot Canaday

Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn

Baltzell

Philadelphia gentlemen: the making of a national upper class

Green

Aircraft Carriers of the United States Navy

Omar H. Ali

In the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States

Ryan Alan

On Tocqueville : democracy and America

Irene S. Rubin

Class, Tax, and Power: Municipal Budgeting in the United States (Public Administration and Public Policy)

Reviews about «Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War»

Discussion, reviews of the book Riches, Class, and Power: United States Before the Civil War and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.