Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America / Edition 1

by Stephen P. Rice

Overview

In this innovative book, Stephen P. Rice offers a new understanding of class formation in America during the several decades before the Civil War. This was the period in the nation's early industrial development when travel by steamboat became commonplace, when the railroad altered concepts of space and time, and when Americans experienced the beginnings of factory production. These disorienting changes raised a host of questions about what machinery would accomplish. Would it promote equality or widen the distance between rich and poor? Among the most contentious questions were those focusing on the social consequences of mechanization: while machine enthusiasts touted the extent to which machines would free workers from toil, others pointed out that people needed to tend machines, and that that work was fundamentally degrading and exploitative.

Minding the Machine shows how members of a new middle class laid claim to their social authority and minimized the potential for class conflict by playing out class relations on less contested social and technical terrains. As they did so, they defined relations between shopowners—and the overseers, foremen, or managers they employed—and wage workers as analogous to relations between head and hand, between mind and body, and between human and machine.

Rice presents fascinating discussions of the mechanics' institute movement, the manual labor school movement, popular physiology reformers, and efforts to solve the seemingly intractable problem of steam boiler explosions. His eloquent narrative demonstrates that class is as much about the comprehension of social relations as it is about the making of social relations, and that class formation needs to be understood not only as a social struggle but as a conceptual struggle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520227811
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/30/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	243
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Stephen P. Rice is Associate Professor of American Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	ix
	Acknowledgments	xi
	Introduction	1
1.	The Antebellum Popular Discourse on Mechanization	12
2.	Head and Hand: The Mechanics' Institute Movement and the Conception of Class Authority	42
3.	Hand and Head: The Manual Labor School Movement	69
4.	Mind and Body: Popular Physiology and the Health of a Nation	96
5.	Human and Machine: Steam Boiler Explosions and the Making of the Engineer	115
	Epilogue	145
	Notes	157
	Bibliography	199
	Index	223