Religion and the working class in antebellum America
By: Jama Lazerow.
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Washington
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 353
ISBN-13: 9781560985440
Subjects: Church and labor -- United States -- History -- 19th century; Labor movement -- United States -- Religious aspects -- Protestant churches -- History -- 19th century; Working class -- Religious life -- United States -- History -- 19th century
Description: Providing for the first time a national, regional, and local picture of religion's role in working-class formation, this book challenges the now common notion that the republican ideal constituted the principal ideological impulse behind the development of the early American labor movement.

Uncovering the pervasive presence of Christian institutions, ritual, and language in the first flowerings of labor protest, Jama Lazerow argues that religion promoted a withering critique of industrializing America yet at the same time retarded the formation of working-class consciousness.

The book recreates the social and cultural world of workers in antebellum America with detailed studies of communities including Fall River, Fitchburg, and Boston, Massachusetts; Wilmington, Delaware; and Rochester, New York.

Lazerow's exhaustive and unprecedented research - into local church records, tax lists, small-town historical society vaults, and private homes, as well as contemporary magazines, letters, diaries, and memoirs - has yielded a rich reinterpretation of working people and their churches.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 223-318) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : Religion, the Working Class, and American Historians; title: Ch. 1. The Inheritance : The World They Encountered, the World They Made; title: Ch. 2. The Problems They Faced : Labor and Infidelity; title: Ch. 3. The Problems They Faced : Labor and the Infidel Church; title: Ch. 4. Labor Activists in the Church : New England; title: Ch. 5. Labor Activists in the Church : The Working Men of Wilmington, Delaware; title: Ch. 6. Labor Activists in the Church : Rochester, New York; title: Ch. 7. Meetinghouses and Ministers : The Church and Clergy Contribution; title: Ch. 8. Sources of Inspiration; title: Ch. 9. Labor's Critique : The Degradation of Work and the Rise of Inequality; title: Ch. 10. Labor's Critique : The Decline of the Moral Community and the Rise of Social Chaos; title: Ch. 11. The Road to Redemption : Labor's Christian Vision and the Question of Christian Means; title: Epilogue