Review Essay: Class,Party,and Status from Progressive to Postmodern: A Social History Perspective

Robert Merton , Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1957).

Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong, The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), offer the diamond-shaped class structure. Mary R. Jackman and Robert W. Jackson, Class Awareness in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), offer the most detailed analysis of self-identified social class. They report that, when given the choice, 41 percent of men identify with "working class" and 41 percent identify with "middle class." Women were much less likely (33 percent) to choose "working class." Blacks were much less likely (22 percent) to choose "middle class" (p. 18).

Richard Hogan, Class and Community in Frontier Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 35-36, on Denver in 1860; to contrast the purchase of land in Greeley, Colorado, in 1870, see pp. 84-91.

E.P. Thompson , The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966).

Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), vii. Richard Hogan, The Failure of Planning: Permitting Sprawl in San Diego Suburbs, 1970-1999 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 161. Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996) is cited by Hornstein; his comments on gendered heroism were from an informal conversation with one of my students and me at the American Sociological Association meeting in Montreal, 2006. Paula England might be the ultimate authority on gender inequality in employment earnings and in household tasks-see, for example, Michael Bittman, Paula England, Liana Sayer, Nancy Folbre, and George Matheson, "When Does Gender Trump Money?: Bargaining and Time in Household Work." American Journal of Sociology 109 (2003): 186-214. Suzanne Bianchi is definitely the authority on recent trends in housework and family life-see, for example, Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson, and Melissa A. Milkie, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). A good place to begin a consideration of gender and class in postindustrial America would be Robert Perrucci and Carolyn C. Perrucci, eds., The Transformation of Work in the New Economy: Sociological Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955). James E. Wright, The Politics of Populism: Dissent in Colorado (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Wright, Class Counts, 398

Hogan, The Failure of Planning, 134. A selection of major works in this critical tradition on Reconstruction would include W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998 [1935]); Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. (New York: Harper, 1990); Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872-1901: The Black Second (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Richard Hogan, "Fostering Versus Imposing Democracy: Lessons from One Case Where Reconstruction Actually Worked," International Journal of the Humanities 5, no. 3 (2007): 123-30, describes the black middle class of Darien, Georgia, in 1870.

David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 1:302-07, 2:926-940, on "class, status, and party." "Party," for Weber, refers to interest groups, organized in pursuit of power (e.g., political parties). The sociological literature on occupational prestige and class is reviewed in Richard Hogan, "Was Wright Wrong? High-Class Jobs and the Professional Earnings Advantage," Social Science Quarterly 86, no. 3 (September 2005): 645-63.

Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press 2007), 4. Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), explain the continuity in the women’s movement. For examples of the critical Reconstruction literature, see endnote 9 (above).