"The Republic for Which It Stands"

All four of my grandparents were born in the "Gilded Age," between 1874 and 1887, and genealogy sometimes makes me more at home in the 19th century than the 21st. Now that I am almost one-quarter through Richard White's The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, I can say it has enhanced my understanding of that time period more than any other single book.

Yes, this same guy also produced The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. IMO, any normal person would happily rest on the laurels of either work.

Don't Ask Your 1820s Ancestor What His "Job" Was

University of Illinois historian Eric Arnesen puts our nineteenth-century ancestors' lives in perspective:

At the start of the nineteenth century, wage labor was but one of many competing forms or systems of organizing productive activity. Skilled artisans produced in small shops, textile operatives labored in large factories, rural men and women made goods at home through the putting-out system, farm families tilled their lands, garment workers toiled in sweatshops, and African and African-American slaves performed forced labor on plantations or in rural industries and cities. . . . [But by 1870, the United States] had become a nation of employees. Some 67 percent of productively engaged people (involved in gainful occupations) -- a majority of the population -- now worked for somebody else . . . . Self-employment was the exception, not the rule.

Eric Arnesen, "American Workers and the Labor Movement in the Late Nineteenth Century," in Charles W. Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1996), 41-42.


Harold Henderson, "Don't Ask Your 1820s Ancestor What His 'Job' Was," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 December 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]