Book Review

Building on the idea that cultural formations as well as economic conditions "make" class, this volume's essays focus less on occupations than on the material world of consumption, cultural institutions, and leisure time. The introduction by the co-editor Burton J. Bledstein and finely textured essays by two senior scholars—Joyce Appleby and Bruce Laurie—set the stage for the history of middle-class formation in the early nineteenth century. But new work by younger scholars in the subsequent five sections reflects the maturing of middle-class studies. Elizabeth Alice White elaborates the "middle-class market culture" of women who express sentimentalism in fancywork they gift at charity fairs; Debby Applegate provides a theoretical engagement with the problem of middle-class formation too often missing elsewhere, using the career of Henry Ward Beecher to illustrate how "the consolidation of an inclusive middle-class consciousness was intimately linked to the emergence of a national 'commodity consciousness'"; Andrea Volpe demonstrates how the middle-class body was constructed in posing for and sharing cartes de visite; Jeffrey Hornstein details the professionalizing of realtors, illuminating how middle-class identity is a gendered rhetorical, ideological, and political project; and Adam Green's analysis of the Wonder Books demonstrates the range of racial meanings to being middle class and suggests this black middle class may be better characterized as activist than conservative.

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