Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class

by Herbert George Gutman

Essays on the lives of workers, the formation of class during the Gilded Age, and the lives of African American enslaved people and freedmen Finally available in paperback, Power and Culture is the last work by America's most influential labor and social historian, the late Herbert Gutman. Edited and introduced by Gutman's colleague Ira Berlin, the book includes original, unpublished essays from throughout Gutman's career and important but unavailable works from journals and periodicals, as well as an extended interview with Gutman and a comprehensive bibliography of his works. Power and Culture features essays on the lives of workers and the formation of class during the "Gilded Age" of American corporations, and on the lives of African American enslaved people and freedmen―the studies for which Gutman became famous. But it also shows the range of his thought on such subjects as Roots and popular historical awareness. With Berlin's critical and biographical introduction, Power and Culture is an important reappraisal of a major scholar.

Genres: Labor, History

464 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 1987

About the author

A specialist in slavery and labor history, Herbert George Gutman was professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Reviews

[Richard Haynes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a group of essays written by the author who applied statistics and facts to his historical thoughts. With emphasis on labor and class he studied census numbers and plantation owner diaries in order to influence future historians to dig deeper into not what men and women do but what men and women do after what happens to them. Excellent reading to learn how one of the more important thinkers thought as mankind continues on.

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most interesting part of this book is the first essay, which is entirely about the life of the putative author of the volume. There's a real narrative arc and personal sweep and it reminds you that even people you've never heard of are important in some way.

Regarding Gutman's essays themselves, the important takeaways are embedded in that first essay. The rest are just statistics and details without real context.

It seems like Gutman's major emphasis was to discuss the agency of relatively powerless Americans to show that they counted, but it is not clear if that distorts the history.