| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jeffrey M. Hornstein. A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class. (Radical Perspectives: A Radical History Review Book Series.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 252. $22.95.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans in numerous occupations responded to the loss of identity brought about by the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy. For many, the professions became a means of achieving—or retaining—social status as the definition of middle class was being refashioned to include white collar workers. In the process, professionals replaced training with education, regulated membership in their associations, and held their members to a standard of ethics.	1
Jeffrey M. Hornstein traces the rise of one such group, detailing the movement by real estate salesmen to professionalize their business and, in so doing, contribute to the rise of a national middle class. Hornstein deftly outlines the shift from curbstone broker to business professions setting it into the wider context of twentieth-century cultural history. His study involves five inter-related themes: the redefinition of a substandard, even disreputable, occupation (the "curbstone broker") into a respectable profession (the realtor); the concomitant redefinition of the American middle class; the shift from an all-boy network to an integrated, but gender-differentiated, field as women entered the domestic real estate market; the privileging of the single-family house in the suburbs as the quintessential icon of the American dream; and the incorporation of that dream into the fight against communism in the 1950s.	. . .

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