Academic paper by an author affiliated with Columbia University, surveying the economic and social conditions of merchant entrepreneurs from the eastern U.S., Europe, and other countries, who came to San Francisco between 1849 and 1852 and became suppliers to the gold miners. Investigates the assertion that San Francisco offered more opportunity for social and occupational mobility than U.S. cities in the East; and examines economic and social conditions based on class, ethnic group, and country of origin.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.
This important contribution to the literature on mobility in nineteenth-century America examines with a fine microscope the world of work in Poughkeepsie, New York. The careers of all workers in each occupation--the entire labor force in this city with an 1870 population of 20,000--are traced over three decades. The book clarifies for the first time in any mobility study the meaning of shifts in employment through detailed examination of individual occupations. It shows concretely how industrialization altered the structure of opportunity; it specifies how the change affected the occupational niches and paths of mobility found by Irish, German, and British newcomers compared to white and black natives. By reassessing the significance of achieving particular occupations such as clerking and craft proprietorships, the book poses important questions for historical interpretations of gross indices of mobility such as shift from blue-collar to white-collar status. The authors favor comparability in their general analysis of mobility from federal census rolls and city directories, but they refine it through a broad research base, including tax rolls, local newspapers, and voluntary association records. Their study is one of the first to make systematic use of the credit reports on every business in one city from the R. G. Dun & Co. manuscripts. It also provides the first full description of the employment of women, permitting comparison with the opportunities for men. Other distinctive aspects include treatment of the crucial dimension of wealth and income, close attention to shifts in occupations produced by transformations in technology, marketing, and finance, and some disentangling of the influence of religion and nationality upon achievement. The fine lens of this microscopic study has enabled Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen to describe geographic, occupational, and property mobility in a small city with statistical precision, to illuminate the larger social processes which shaped that mobility, and, simultaneously, to vivify the working lives of anonymous American men and women.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.
Beginning with the 1760s, when lynching and vigilantism came into existence in what is now the United States, this bibliography fills a void in the history of American collective violence. It covers over 4,200 works dealing with vigilante movements and lynchings, including books, articles, government documents, and unpublished theses and dissertations. Following a chapter listing general works, the book is arranged into four chronological chapters, a chapter on the frontier West, a chapter on anti-lynching, and chapters on literature and art. The book opens with a chapter devoted to general works. It then includes chapters on the period from the Colonial era to the Civil War, the Civil War through 1881, and the periods from 1882 to 1916 and 1917 to 1996. The work then turns to the frontier West and to anti-lynching bills, laws, organizations, and leaders. Finally, the book includes chapters on vigilantism in literature and art.
