Community Studies and the Investigation of Nineteenth-Century Social Relations

Abstract

The recent popularity of community studies among investigators of nineteenth-century social history in the United States owes much to convergence of interests since the early 1970s among four broad groupings of historians: labor and radical historians concerned with class-formation; historians of women and the family; immigration historians; and urban historians concerned with the transformation of spatial and social structure. Stressing the importance of the interrelationships between their subjects, historians with these interests have tended to see the community study as the best means of describing the interrelationships fully and concretely. Howard Chudacoff expressed this perception when he characterized books on the artisans of Newark and on the iron and textile workers of Troy and Cohoes as “community studies of the best type, for they combine working class history with perspectives on family, ethnicity, mobility, stratification, ideology, technology, politics, and … show the importance of interactions between place and behavior” (Chudacoff, 1979: 535).

Rethinking American Urban History: New Directions for the Posturban Era

“…Paul Faler (1981) was even less interested in the urban dimension, suggesting that "local history" was the best vehicle for exploring human experience in rich, concrete detail. As a scholar who helped mark the outset of Marxist analysis with his study of Lynn, Massachusetts, Alan Dawley (1976) chose the "community" form of study-the favored term in the genre, according to Griffen (1986)-with the anticipation of examining "grand and sweeping hypotheses" quite extraneous to any specifically urban dimension. Much as John Blassingame (1972) culled information from a variety of places to make the case that slaves formed a community, labor historians have drawn together evidence regardless of source to make a similar case for the formation of a distinctive worker culture.…”