The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (American Century) [Paperback]

Alan Trachtenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1982 | ISBN-10: 0809001454 | ISBN-13: 978-0809001453 | Edition: Underlined

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. This 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Incorporation of America is one of these 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

About the Author

Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Gray, Jr., Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, is the author of Reading American Photographs.

Product Details

• Paperback: 276 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang; Underlined edition (March 1, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809001454
• ISBN-13: 978-0809001453
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #450,557 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic of American Studies, July 19, 2004

By 

S. Pactor "reader" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (American Century) (Paperback)

This is an early (well, mid year) front runner for best book I've read all year. It is also one of the first books I've read that I purchased solely based on an Amazon.com recommendation. Kudos to you Amazon.com, faceless computer program you may be, but you DO recommend good books. I'm quite sure I could have lived the entire rest of my life and never had any one recommend this book to me in causal (or non-casual) conversation.

Trachtenburg, a Professor of American Studies, picks up where authors like Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith left off: Trying to analyze the ways in which America became the nation it is today. Like Smith in "Virgin Land" and Marx in "The Machine in the Garden", Trachtenberg ranges across disciplines (literature, economics, sociology, etc.) to develop a nuanced thesis. Although he approaches his thesis ellipitcally (in true American Studies fashion), it is hard to deny the power of his observations. In its simplest terms, Trachtenberg attempts to show the way in which the corporation became the dominant force in shaping American identity.

Importantly, he does not treat this development as a foregone conclusion. THrought the book, he develops the idea of a counter definition of America, one that draws on the tradition of Indian culture and American Populism, to show how much the corporation had to overcome in order to dominate America's definition of itself.

Along the way, he tackles not only the history of the corporation itself, but the way business took over the political system and the way corporate america co-opted the artistic elite. It is this last observation, which Trachtenberg describes via his incredible analysis of the "White City" at the Chicago World's Fair, that I found most revelatory.

Check this book out! And thanks to Amazon.com for recommending it to me!

42 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ignore the review up above; it has not a clue., July 30, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (American Century) (Paperback)

This book revolutionized the debates on naturalism and realism of the later part of the nineteenth century. It is one of the best interpretations I have ever read about how the formation of corporations were inaugerated in the 1870s with growing mechanization, industrialization, labor strife, and depressions. I have no idea what the prior review means that Trachtenberg looks too much at literary history in that the book only devotes one out of its seven chapters to the writers of the times. The book is mainly concerned with showing the interactions between labor and capital, the formation of the new cities, the effects of Westward expansion (once again, I have no idea what the prior reviewer means by having the initial chapter play such a pivotal role since Trachtenberg does not make the claims that the reviewer makes), the growing of populism, and the 1893 Columbia Exposition.

Regardless if one studies history or literature of the late nineteenth century, this book is one of the most important written about the times and offers a wide range of marginal perspective that are usually overlooked in such texts.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Influence of American Corporations in the Guilded Age, March 2, 2006

By 

Terance R. Johnson - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (American Century) (Paperback)

Trachtenberg sets out to examine the effects of the corporate system on American culture and values during the three decades following the Civil War. Specifically, he explores how the changing forms and methods of industry affected the average American's lifestyle and attitudes. He then demonstrates how industrial mechanization and the resulting expansion of the marketplace radically changed labor, education, domestic habits, city life, politics, and mass media.

The author's central argument is that the incorporation of American business on such a massive scale following the Civil War wrenched society from the moorings of its traditional values and propelled Americans into previously uncharted cultural waters. Trachtenberg specifically asserts that corporate power wrested control of the mythical West from the Indians and displaced the landed gentry of rural Jeffersonian America, replacing both with "great cities" like Chicago (epitomized by the White City of the 1893 Columbian Exposition). Moreover, corporate America profoundly changed America's culture and behavior patterns with the introduction of factory labor, department store shopping, mass-media advertising, business-oriented educational curricula, and household consumerism.

The results of this influence can be seen today. Examples include workplace rules and regulations, political influence peddling, the feminization of family relations and consumer habits, the role of universities in preparing students for business careers, the standardization of newspaper reporting and its dependence to advertising revenue, the antagonistic relationship between capital and labor, the replacement of skilled artisans with untrained wage laborers, and the rise of the industrial middle-class.

Furthermore, the author effectively makes the case that industrial mechanization alone did not account for these profound changes. Rather, it was the subsequent expansion and transformation of the marketplace that ultimately replaced the tradition of familial self-reliance with a life centered upon impersonal transactions with merchants. As a result, women's work evolved to mean wise and efficient shopping instead of industrious making and canning. From a place of labor and self support, the home became a place of consumption. Voluminous newspaper ads and giant department stores soon exceeded the social influence of school and church. And the city became the principal site of these transactions, where workers labored to assemble the products, where families lived and utilized factory wages to purchase the products, and where news dailies advertised the latest products.

Trachtenberg follows a pattern of narrative and analysis, liberally sprinkled with figures of speech, tropes, images, and metaphors. Trachtenberg claims that these figurative representations are necessary to clarify the dialectic between mind and world, which I found insightful and illustrative.

The author's sources range from newspapers, historical monographs, and great works of fiction. His book is topical and thematic, with each chapter addressing a specific feature of the era's social history.