Alan Dawley is Professor of History, The College of New Jersey, and author of Struggles for Justice (Harvard).
Review
"Praise for the first edition: Class and Community is an original study. It does far more than help liberate
local history from town boosters ... It restores the American industrial revolution to historiography's center
stage, where it belongs."
--New York Times
"This is a welcome re-issue of one of the first and best of the community studies of industrial change in
the nineteenth-century United States that emerged with the "new social history" of the 1970s. First published
in 1976, Dawley's book was widely influential as a model case study, as an application of class analysis to American
social history, and as an example of social history with the politics left in. "
--Christopher Clark, History [UK]
"At a time when global forces often seem more important than any particular place, this classic study of America's
industrial revolution reminds us that the local community can sometimes provide the most revealing setting for
understanding larger social processes. "
--Leon Fink, author of Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment
"
The author brilliantly examines the structure and culture of Lynn shoemakers...Diligent research, unearthing of
new information, sophisticated conceptualization, imaginative thinking...make this book an extraordinary contribution
in American social and economic history."
--Historian
Harvard University Press Web Site, July, 2002
Summary
In this twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his Bancroft PrizeÐwinning book, Dawley reflects once more on
labor and class issues, poverty and progress, and the contours of urban history in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts,
during the rise of industrialism in the early nineteenth century.
