E. P. Thompson and the American Working Class
Published in 1963, Thompson’s influential The Making of the English Working Class quickly led to questions about the nature of the American working class.
Dawn of the Bathroom
The bathroom didn’t become a thing until the nineteenth century, and most working-class US homes added plumbed-in amenities in piecemeal fashion over time.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
In a 1931 lecture, Mahatma Gandhi described a potential future for India, if only it could move beyond the caste system and communal tensions.
Bodies of the Titanic: Found and Lost Again
Ideas about economic class informed decisions about which recovered bodies would be preserved for land burial and which would be returned to the icy seas.
Drunk as a Lord? OK, if You’re a Lord
Where does class-based hypocrisy over substance use come from? Look to the seventeenth century.
Building A Better Democracy?
Metaphors of construction have been popular in American history from the start. How come?
Food and Class: What’s in the Fridge?
A recent New York Times quiz got us thinking about refrigerators, food, diet, and assumptions about class. Here are 12 stories on the subject.
Life in the Iron Mills as Fiction of the “Close-Outsider Witness”
Rebecca Harding Davis had no firsthand experience of iron mills. Neither does her nameless narrator.
Why Everyone Doesn’t Value Choice to the Same Degree
Studies show that college-educated white Americans value having choice -- and yet having too much choice can paralyze and lead to dissatisfaction.
A 19th-Century Catfishing Scheme
In the late 1800s, a U.K. scheme lured lonely bachelors with newspaper advertisements supposedly placed by wealthy women.