Class and Community

The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition, with a New Preface

ISBN 9780674004313

Publication date: 09/15/2000

In this twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his prize-winning book, Dawley reflects once more on labor and class issues, poverty and progress, and the contours of urban history in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, during the rise of industrialism in the early nineteenth century. He not only revisits this urban conglomeration, but also seeks out previously unheard groups such as women and blacks. The result is a more rounded portrait of a small eastern city on the verge of becoming modern.

Praise

At a time when global forces often seem more important than any particular place, this classic study of America's industrial revolution reminds us that the local community can sometimes provide the most revealing setting for understanding larger social processes.

—Leon Fink, author of Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment
Praise for the first edition: Class and Community is an original study. It does far more than help liberate local history from town boosters ... It restores the American industrial revolution to historiography's center stage, where it belongs.

—New York Times
The author brilliantly examines the structure and culture of Lynn shoemakers...Diligent research, unearthing of new information, sophisticated conceptualization, imaginative thinking...make this book an extraordinary contribution in American social and economic history.

—Historian
This is a welcome re-issue of one of the first and best of the community studies of industrial change in the nineteenth-century United States that emerged with the "new social history" of the 1970s. First published in 1976, Dawley's book was widely influential as a model case study, as an application of class analysis to American social history, and as an example of social history with the politics left in.

—Christopher Clark, History