Word: gutman
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...What Gutman sees in each of these separate phenomena is the powerful way in which older cultural and societal norms continued, even in the midst of vast economic growth that, from the time Lincoln was elected to 1894, saw the U.S. move from fourth place in terms of the value of its manufactured product, to first and a net total worth almost exceeding that of the sum-total of the three previous leaders, France, Britain and Germany. Sex, religion, nativity and prior rural and village cultures still meant something to workers caught up in an all-encompassing industrialization...
...LARGER developments that Gutman describes and documents in his title essay, the most theoretically ambitious in the collection of reprinted articles. In "Work, Culture and Society," Gutman presents his most striking case for the reexamination of labor history, at least during the industrializing process in America in the 19th century. He concentrates on three important phenomena among the working class populations: the different work habits and expectations workers brought to new factories from their diverse backgrounds; the social and cultural continuities in the lives of craftsmen and artisans during America's industrializing period; and similarities between forms of American working...
...Gutman describes how New York cabinet-makers, ship-builders and other self-employed artisans followed a pattern of "alternate bouts of intense labor and idleness," as they had in their respective old crafts and, as E.P. Thompson has pointed out, wherever men were self-employed. But these older traditions associated with work were replaced by machines and met by management demands for regularity in work habits. Occasionally men would continue with their older work-habits knowing it led to their impoverishment. But Gutman is interested in the tensions industrialization created for these older lifestyles when they were faced with inevitable...
Economic imperatives, Gutman thus concludes, were not the sole determinants of 19th century workers' way of life or even of their collective actions as a movement. But he also emphasizes how much more research has to be done. In an essay on Protestantism and the American labor movement, he only outlines the "relationship between religious sentiment and rhetoric and everyday behavior." He calls the relationship a "risky" theoretical construct, and asks for more study. In another essay on black mineworkers and the miners' union he traces; the still sketchy life of one of the first black union organizers, Richard Davis...
...GUTMAN ACKNOWLEDGES his indebtedness to historians like Thompson, who have forged ahead with much the same task across the Atlantic in Britain, and Thompson's mark is everywhere present in Gutman's book. But even in Britain, where Thompson's work has begun to create a great deal of new historical investigation, the forces of established history still exist. One of the so-called classic reference textbooks in modern English history, R.K. Webb's Modern England, written five years after Thompson, is quite openly "based on an old-fashioned but still lively assumption--that the people in power...