X - The Archaeology of Class in Urban America Stephen

When E. P. Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class he sought to produce a history of people enmeshed in a struggle for self-determination and selfrealization against great opposition. His was not a work of abstraction. It described real individuals in real situations and placed them all in a context rich enough to make the book accessible to the working-class people of his own day. The success of his effort was built not on its analytical brilliance as a piece of Marxist history, but rather as a narrative of events and engagements that brought the reader almost step by step through a tumultuous period in English history. His narrative, more than eight hundred pages long, never lost sight of either the individual or groups as agents of historical change. Indeed, its greatest strength may be that the reader is presented with concrete examples of what early industrial capitalism was like in Britain, the manner in which it contributed to the growth of a working-class consciousness, and the way that consciousness emerged from the intellectual and cultural handiwork of a generation of workers and activists. It was not, as he would later say, “steam power plus the factory system equals the working class” (Abelove et al. 1983:7). Instead Thompson was able to weave together a multitude of local and national strands of thought into a coherent picture of historical change. The goals of this book are more modest in scope. In it I present a series of intimate portraits of individual and corporate households in eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island and nineteenth-century Lowell, Massachusetts that serve as vehicles for exploring the changing face of class during a period of major transformation in the evolution of capitalism. By focusing on Newport and Lowell, I have chosen communities whose histories were dominated by particular political economies, merchant or mercantile capitalism and industrial capitalism respectively (Fig. 1.1). This study places the experiences of individuals and households into the culturalhistorical fabric of their particular communities through documentary research, a common practice in historical archaeology. Where this study cultivates new terrain is in viewing this period of change as a set of overlapping cultural, historical, and biophysical spaces. By examining the meaning behind the existence of these spaces and the manner in which they changed between the eighteenth and early twentieth