The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age

by Alan Trachtenberg

Overview

A classic examination of the roots of corporate culture, newly revised and updated for the twenty first century

Alan Trachtenberg presents a balanced analysis of the expansion of capitalist power in the last third of the nineteenth century and the cultural changes it brought in its wake. In America's westward expansion, labor unrest, newly powerful cities, and newly mechanized industries, the ideals and ideas by which Americans lived were reshaped, and American society became more structured, with an entrenched middle class and a powerful business elite. Here, in an updated edition which includes a new introduction and a revised bibliographical essay, is a brilliant, essential work on the origins of America's corporate culture and the formation of the American social fabric after the Civil War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809058280
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/06/2007
Edition description:	25th Anniversary Edition
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	592,383
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Alan Trachtenberg is the Neil Gray Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American studies at Yale University, where he taught for thirty-five years. His books include Shades of Hiawatha (H&W, 2004).

Table of Contents

Preface to the Twenty-fifth-Anniversary Edition     ix
Acknowledgments     xvii
Preface     3
The Westward Route     11
Mechanization Takes Command     38
Capital and Labor     70
Mysteries of the Great City     101
The Politics of Culture     140
Fictions of the Real     182
White City     208
Revised and Expanded Bibliographical Essay     235
Index     263

Editorial Reviews

The Incorporation of America is one of those historical essays that not only illuminate their particular subject matter—in this case, American culture and society in the last half of the nineteenth century—but deepen our understanding of how we might think about the general question of 'culture' itself.” —Warren I. Susman, Rutgers University

“This book realizes an ideal often mentioned as the goal of American Studies but seldom achieved: it is a truly 'interdisciplinary' account of American culture at a turning point in our history. Mr. Trachtenberg is not merely a scholar, he is a writer. Reading is a pleasure, not a duty.” —Henry Nash Smith, University of California at Berkeley

“This graceful venture in cultural history provides a fresh and stimulating interpretation of American society during the last decades of the nineteenth century.” —John M. Blum, Yale University

From the Publisher