Community Studies and the Investigation of Nineteenth-Century Social Relations

THE RECENT popularity of community studies among investigators of nineteenth-century social history in the United States owes much to convergence of interests since the early 1970s among four broad groupings of historians: labor and radical historians concerned with class-formation; historians of women and the family; immigration historians; and urban historians concerned with the transformation of spatial and social structure. Stressing the importance of the interrelationships between their subjects, historians with these interests have tended to see the community study as the best means of describing the interrelationships fully and concretely. Howard Chudacoffexpressed this perception when he characterized books on the artisans of Newark and on the iron