These essays provide enticing glimpses into how the market revolution influenced Americans' lives and ideas—and how people shaped their own lives in response. Venturing well beyond familiar characters and places, the authors introduce Choctaws in the old southwest and French Canadians in Vermont, and examine cultural sites ranging from urban theaters and rural parlors to animal shows and the pages ... Read moreof temperance novels. In the process, they model different approaches to writing cultural history, from close textual analysis to the history of communications.
Scott Casper, author of Constructing American Lives An important collection of the latest work by historians who seek to understand the cultural changes wrought by the advent of market capitalism in the United States.
Journal of American History
Martin's collection offers great insight into how different people used the market for a variety of purposes, including efforts to curb it by expanding opportunity for some groups, socially excluding others, achieving moral reformation, and attaining civility.
Journal of the Early Republic, Fall 2006
This seamlessly crafted collection is sure to attract a wide readership among scholars and students interested in the market revolution. Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, these ten essays explore the previously ignored cultural implications of capitalist expansion by analyzing racial, ethnic, and class identity, popular entertainment, and gendered perceptions of rural conviviality. Together with Killing Time, this significant anthology establishes Scott C. Martin as the leading authority on leisure and sociability during the antebellum era.
Douglas R. Egerton, author of He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey Add this collection to your growing shelf of commentary on the 'market revolution' in early America. These essays stretch our understanding far beyond immediate economic consequences and help us understand why the emergence of a capitalist economic system impressed all Americans as a signal experience of the antebellum generation. Both friends and enemies of modern enterprise will learn much about the rich mosaic of experience that was the market revolution.
John Lauritz Larson, Purdue University Show Less