| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jonathan A. Glickstein. American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 2002. Pp. x, 361. $39.50.

In this densely argued monograph, Jonathan A. Glickstein explores a series of contemporary debates over the material incentives that governed antebellum America's wage labor markets. Drawing eclectically on public sources such as newspapers, periodicals, political pamphlets, and economics treatises, Glickstein identifies a vigorously contested cultural terrain in which social commentators tussled over the fundamental impulses that drove wage laborers, as well as the greatest threats to the future prospects of skilled wage workers. Although the book occasionally considers the likely understandings of marginalized groups such as female wage earners and free blacks, Glickstein focuses on the viewpoints of politicians, reformers, and especially members of the skilled, urban, native-born working class. Throughout the author displays a wide-ranging command of nineteenth-century social and economic history, economic theory, and recent developments in cultural studies, frequently comparing antebellum intellectual currents to their counterparts in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and to those in our own time.

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