Blumin, Stuart M. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760 – 1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

== Summary ==
This
book examines the making and meaning of “middle class” as a special aspect of
American social development as part of city life, urbanization, and American
industrial-capitalist development in the 19th century. Americans of
middling economic and social position “were formed and formed themselves into a
relatively coherent and ascending middle class during the middle decades of the
nineteenth century.” Blumin reformulates middle
class formation in terms of the types of social and cultural experience – work,
consumption, residential location, formal and informal voluntary association,
and family organization and strategy. He contends that particular developments
in the 19th century and particularly after the Civil War – widening
differences between non-manual and manual work, the expansion of middle class
suburbanization, and the resumption and expansion of social and economic
conflict phrased in class terms – contributed to the articulation of the
American middle class. During the Jacksonian era and in urban centers,
non-manual and manual functions were separated in artisan shops, white collar
neighborhoods formed, a distinct middle-class home became recognizable by
particular artifacts, and new patterns of associations emerged among white
collar individuals.
Example: The
changing nature of artisan shops, factories, and retails showrooms and the
development of a middle class took shape in architecture and spatial
arrangements, the incomes, wealth, and mobility patterns of workers and
proprietors. For example, non-manual businessmen and clerks made more money
than skilled workers and accumulated more property. As a result, non-manual and
manual sectors of antebellum cities diverged economically between men who worked
with their heads and mean who worked with their hands (Republican prejudice).
See also: Jeanne Boydston, Charles Sellers, Christopher Clark