| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic. By Laura Rigal. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xii, 253 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-01558-9.)

Most historians will find Laura Rigal's exploration of the literary and visual culture of Philadelphia in the early republic a bold, even insightful, and yet ultimately obtuse book. Rigal strives to connect literature and the arts in postrevolutionary Philadelphia to the emerging industrial economy of the Delaware Valley, thereby placing labor and class formation into the historical analysis and theoretical criticism of early national texts and objects. She asserts that "the making of American labor was not simply caused by the exploitation of real, or actual, producers in factories; it emerged as the artifact of myriad representational structures, or, as this book argues, via a dense, multiply mediated 'cultural production of production.'" While Rigal's goals are laudatory, the previous sentence is indicative of a highly theoretical study that often does not ground itself in the historical evidence of socioeconomic change. . . .

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