Search results for ""Author Michael Zakim""
University of Chicago Press ReadyMade Democracy A History of Mens Dress in the American Republic 17601860
£37.50
The University of Chicago Press Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860
"Ready-Made Democracy" explores the history of men's dress in America to consider how capitalism and democracy emerged at the center of social life during the century between the Revolution and the Civil War. The story begins with the elevation of homespun clothing to a political ideology on the eve of Independence. Homespun clothing tied the productive efforts of the household to those of the nation, becoming a most tangible expression of the citizen's attachment to the public's happiness. Coarse dress did not long remain in the wardrobe, particularly not among those political classes who talked most about it. Nevertheless, exhortations of industry and simplicity became a fixture of American discourse over the following century of industrial revolution, as the mass-produced suit emerged as a badge of a uniquely virtuous American polity. It is here, Zakim argues, in the evolution of homespun into its readymade opposite, that men's dress proves to be both material and metaphor for the rise of democratic capitalism - and a site of the new social arrangements of bourgeois life. In thus illuminating the critical links among culture, ideology, political economy, and fashion in antebellum America, "Ready-Made Democracy" will be essential to anyone interested in the history of the United States and the construction of modern life.
£32.41
The University of Chicago Press Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America
Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America's transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, "Capitalism Takes Command" presents a history of family farming, general incorporation laws, mortgage payments, inheritance practices, office systems, and risk management - an inventory of the means by which capitalism became America's new revolutionary tradition. This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past. As business ceaselessly revised its own practices, a new demographic of private bankers, insurance brokers, investors in securities, and start-up manufacturers, among many others, assumed center stage, displacing older elites and forms of property. Explaining how capital became an "ism" and how business became a political philosophy, "Capitalism Takes Command" brings the economy back into American social and cultural history.
£32.41