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At Home in Nineteenth-Century America uses primary documentsto revisit the variety of places Americans called home—middle-class suburban houses, slave cabins, working-class tenements, frontier dugouts, urban settlement houses—and explore the shifting interpretations and experiences of these spaces from within and without. The selection and juxtaposition of primary sources compresses the insights of several historical fields and approaches, including house history, social history, and cultural history. It also draws heavily from the work of women’s history, particularly scholarship exploring the separate spheres ideal. Rather than offering an account of material culture, architectural history, or Victorian domesticity, this volume uses the home as a synthetic tool to pull together stories of nineteenth-century America. The result is less a tidy account of shared domestic values, or a straightforward chronology of change over time, than an opportunity to eavesdrop on a wide-ranging conversation recounting the ways in which a variety of women and men created, conformed to, critiqued, and transformed the ideal of home. This conversation included a diverse group of historical actors: a domestic servant and Herman Melville, a newlywed housewife and W.E.B. Du Bois, an interior designer and Theodore Roosevelt, all of whom contemplated the power and boundaries of the American home. Together, these voices offer an intimate yet broad view of nineteenth-century American history and sketch a narrative of both inclusion and difference.

Brokering Servitude examines how labor markets for domestic service were identified, shaped, and governed by philanthropists, missionaries, commercial offices, and the state. Because household service was undesirable work and stigmatized as menial and unfree, brokers were integral to steering and compelling women, men, and children into this labor. By the end of the nineteenth century, the federal government—as the sovereign power responsible for overseeing immigration—had become a major broker of domestic labor through border controls. By determining eligibility for entry, federal immigration officials dictated the availability of workers for domestic labor and under what conditions they could be contracted. Brokering Servitude is the first book to connect the political economy of domestic labor in the United States to the nation’s historic legacy as an imperial power engaged in continental expansion, the opening of overseas labor markets in Europe and Asia, and the dismantling of the unfree labor regime that slavery represented. The question of how to best broker the social relations of production necessary to support middle-class domesticity generated contentious debates about race, citizenship, and economic development. This book asserts that the political economy of reproductive labor, usually confined to the static space of the home, cannot be properly understood without attention to labor migrations, and especially migrations of workers who were assisted, compelled, or contracted. Their interventions responded to household employers who were eager to not only compare the merits of different labor sources, but also pit these sources against each other.

In 1852 Hannah Rebecca Crowell married sea captain William Burgess and set sail. Within three years, Rebecca Burgess had crossed the equator eleven times and learned to navigate a vessel. In 1856, 22-year-old Rebecca saved the ship Challenger as her husband lay dying from dysentery. The widow returned to her family's home in Sandwich, Massachusetts, where she refused all marriage proposals and died wealthy in 1917. This is the way Rebecca Burgess recorded her story in her prodigious journals and registers, which she donated to the local historical society upon her death, but there is no other evidence that this dramatic event occurred exactly this way. This book examines how Burgess constructed her own legend and how the town of Sandwich embraced that history as its own. Through careful analysis of myriad primary sources, the book also addresses how Burgess dealt with the conflicting gender roles of her life, reconciling her traditionally masculine adventures at sea and her independent lifestyle with the accepted ideals of the period's “Victorian woman.”

One winter night in 1879, at a lonely Kansas campsite near Crooked Creek, a man was shot to death. The dead man's traveling companion identified him as John Wesley Hillmon, a cowboy from Lawrence who had been attempting to carve out a life on the blustery prairie. The case might have been soon forgotten and the apparent widow, Sarah Quinn Hillmon, left to mourn, except for the $25,000 life insurance policies Hillmon had taken out shortly before his departure. The insurance companies refused to pay on the policies, claiming that the dead man was not John Hillmon, and Sallie was forced to take them to court in a case that would reach the Supreme Court twice. The companies' case rested on a crucial piece of evidence: a faded love letter written by a disappeared cigarmaker, declaring his intent to travel westward with a “man named Hillmon.” This book re-examines the long-neglected evidence in the case of the Kansas cowboy and his wife, recreating the court scenes that led to a significant Supreme Court ruling on the admissibility of hearsay evidence. It employs modern forensic methods to examine the body of the dead man, attempting to determine his true identity and finally put this fascinating mystery to rest. The book combines the drama, intrigue, and emotion of excellent storytelling with cutting-edge forensic investigation techniques and legal theory.

In the bustling cities of the mid-nineteenth-century Northeast, young male clerks working in commercial offices and stores were on the make, persistently seeking wealth, respect, and self-gratification. Yet these strivers and “counter jumpers” discovered that claiming the identities of independent men—while making sense of a volatile capitalist economy and fluid urban society—was fraught with uncertainty. This book illuminates at once the power of the ideology of self-making and the important contests over the meanings of respectability, manhood, and citizenship that helped to determine who clerks were and who they would become. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, including clerks' diaries, newspapers, credit reports, census data, advice literature, and fiction, the book argues that a better understanding of clerks and clerking helps make sense of the culture of capitalism and the society it shaped in this pivotal era.