Class
by
As an analytical tool and historiographical category, “class” has an important place in American studies and cultural studies, if only because so many people have thought it irrelevant to the study of the United States. Unlike Europe’s old countries, with their feudal pasts and monarchical legacies, the United States, it has often been said, is a land of unlimited economic and geographical mobility. Abraham Lincoln was only one of the most notable believers in “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States, uniquely among the globe’s nations, assigned its citizens no fixed class definition and afforded boundless opportunity to those who would only work hard and look beyond the next horizon. The reality is much more complicated, as scholars and critics have to some extent always known and over the past forty years have demonstrated in studies of U.S. class formation, cultural allegiance, and artistic expression. Some form of class consciousness has existed in North America at least since white settlers arrived; John Winthrop’s (1630/1838) well-known sermon aboard the Arbella, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in part justifies the existence of class differences by making them crucial to God’s plan of binding through charity the socially stratified community of Puritan...
This essay may be found on page 48 of the printed volume.