North American Social History

Peter Way recently reviewed Seth Rockman’s Scraping By in the journal Reviews in American History 39 (2011), 47-53. While Way acknowledges Rockman’s “first-rate piece of historical writing,” Rockman’s theorizing of class comes under criticism. Rockman, Way argues “characterizes class as a material condition deriving from one group’s ability to coerce labor or set the conditions for […]

Read Full Post »

The categories of class, race, and gender are at the heart of the analytical work of social historians. However, over the past 30 years the debate has stalled over which category trumps the other. For example, in The Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger argues that the “privileging of class over race is not always productive […]

Read Full Post »