Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T12:35:13.807Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Impact of Poverty and Progress on the Generation of Historians Trained in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Steven A. Riess
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In an era of extreme specialization among American historians, it is rare for a monograph to have had the major impact of Poverty and Progress. While there have been previous studies of social mobility, American ethnic groups, and urban communities, Thernstrom’s study was pathbreaking in his use of research techniques and interpretation, and it established a major agenda for the “New Social History.” The questions he raised and his success in writing history “from the bottom up” captured the imagination of the new generation of historians who attended graduate school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His ability to explore the experience of the inarticulate working class drew the attention of radical or New Left historians who were seeking to write a different type of labor history that focused less on unions and more on working-class culture, as well as of the traditionally oriented consensus historians who wanted to expand the horizons of social and cultural history to encompass the experiences of the greatest numbers of Americans. Thernstrom’s impact on the latest cohort of historians was felt in their methodology and their studies of ethnic subcommunities, working-class culture, and geographic and social mobility.

Type
Comment and Debate: Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress: A Retrospective After Twenty Years
Information
Social Science History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 1986 , pp. 23 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1986 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adelman, M. L. (1986) A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Barton, J. (1975) Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians and Slovaks in an American City, 1890–1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bender, T. (1975) Towards an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
Bodnar, J. (1977) Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town, 1870–1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Bodnar, J., Simon, Roger and Weber, Michael P. (1982) Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Burstein, A. N. (1981) “Immigrants and Residential Mobility: The Irish and Germans in Philadelphia, 1850–1880,” in Hershberg, T. [ed.]. Philadelphia. New York: Oxford University Press: 174–203. (1981a).Google Scholar
Chudacoff, H. (1982) “Success and Security: The Meaning of Social Mobility in America.” Reviews in American History 10 (December): 102–112.Google Scholar
Dawley, A. (1976) Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, Massachusetts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Decker, P. (1978) Fortunes and Failures: White-Collar Mobility in Nineteenth Century San Francisco. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Doyle, D. H. (1978) The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825–1870. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Esslinger, D. R. (1975) Immigrants and the City: Ethnicity and Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century Midwestern Community. Port Washington: Kennikat Press.Google Scholar
Gambino, R. (1975) Blood of My Blood. Garden City: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Golab, C. (1977) Immigrant Destinations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Greenberg, S. (1981) “Industrial Location and Ethnic Residential Patterns in an Industrializing City, Philadelphia, 1880,” in Hershberg, T. [ed.] Philadelphia. New York: Oxford University Press: 204–232.Google Scholar
Gutman, H. (1973) “Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919.” American Historical Review 78 (June): 531–588.Google Scholar
Hershberg, T. (1981) “The New Urban History; Toward an Interdisciplinary History of the City,” in Hershberg, T. [ed.] Philadelphia. New York: Oxford University Press: 3–35.Google Scholar
Hershberg, T., Cox, H., Light, D., and Greenfield, R. R. (1981) “The Journey to Work: An Empirical Investigation of Work, Residence and Transportation in Philadelphia, 1850–1880,” in Hershberg, T. (ed.) Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press: 128–173.Google Scholar
Kessner, T. (1977) The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kirsch, G. B. (1983) “The Rise of Modern Athletics: New Jersey Cricketers, Baseball Players and Clubs, 1845–1860.” New Jersey History 101 (Spring/Summer) 52–84.Google Scholar
Kirsch, G. B. (1984) “American Cricket: Players and Clubs Before the Civil War.” Journal of Sport History 11 (Spring): 28–50.Google Scholar
Kusmer, K.L. (1976) A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Montgomery, D. (1967) Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872. New York: A.A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Pesavento, W. J. (1982) “Sport and Recreation in the Pullman Experiment, 1880–1900.” Journal of Sport History 9 (Summer): 38–62.Google Scholar
Pesavento, W. J. (1983), “Occupations of Pullman Athletes, 1880–1900.” Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the North American Society for Sport History, May, 1983, Mont Alto, Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Pleck, E. H. (1979) Black Migration and Poverty, Boston, 1865–1900. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Riess, S. A. (1980) Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era. Westport: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Riess, S. A. (forthcoming) City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sport.Google Scholar
Romo, R. (1983) East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Thernstrom, S. (1964) Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Thernstrom, S. (1973) The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Vinyard, J. E. (1976) The Irish on the Urban Frontier: Nineteenth Century Detroit. New York: Arno Press.Google Scholar