================= HES POSTING ===================== 
 
Let me suggest that you start by joining the discussion list h-SHEAR, 
which is the discussion list of the Society of the History of the Early 
American Republic.  To do that, go to this website: 
    http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~shear/ 
There has been a lot written on this subject, but you have to understand 
the context in which much of it was written -- usually in the middle of 
one or another of several historiographical controversies over the 
meaning of the evidence (the three biggest problably being the place of 
journeymen in the transition to industrialization, the definition and 
meaning of "proto-industrialization," and the place of households, 
married women, and single women in that transition).  As a historian 
whose specialty is the 18th century, occasionally tiptoeing into the 
19th century, and the early modern American economy, let me also suggest 
that you need to have a good sense of the different sections in the U.S. 
at the time, and that there was no single concept of "journeyman" 
nationwide.   
 
The general take is that Commons was a bit ahead of himself, 
anachronistically finding unions or proto-unions (if I could say that 
without going blech), labor/management controversy, that was not 
representative of the political economy of the times.  But efforts to 
perfectly replicate E.P. Thompson's vision haven't been particularly 
successful, either, in that an awful lot of information has to be 
discarded to get a clean hypothesis -- and in clumsy ways that sometimes 
turned E.P. upside down in their enthusiasm for mimicking his work.   
 
The most accurate thing that could be said about the shoemaking industry 
in the early national republic and antebellum periods was that it really 
depended on WHERE you were.  There are differences in the setup within 
New England; there were the new shoemaking towns along the Erie canal; 
Pennslvanians never did anything the way anybody else did, and through 
the nineteenth century the custom shoemaking industry existed 
side-by-side with the bulk shoemaking industry, in different places and 
for different purposes.  The institutional arrangements changed with 
almost every generation; what was "tradition" in any given decade was 
"innovation" a generation earlier.  But the histories are seldom written 
to acknowledge this -- so you have to read them with an understanding 
that you are only seeing a piece of the whole.   
 
Probably some of the most interesting gems of research were not 
published -- a lot of good dissertations in history remain unpublished 
because the history job market dissolved in the mid-1970s.  Historians 
with Ph.D.'s from Yale and Harvard and Princeton ended up doing 
something else for a living, and their dissertations never got the 
polishing usually necesary for publication.  So I would also recommend 
going through Dissertation Abstracts and seeing what you can pull up -- 
if before the 1970s, you can be pretty sure that anything good was 
published in some form; but many good dissertations completed in the 
1970s and later remain undiscovered.   
 
Hope some of this helps. 
 
BTW -- this awareness of the complexity of the historiography makes it 
very difficult for a historian such as myself, who also has studied a 
lot of economic theory, when economic historians "invade" my territory 
-- early modern America and western Europe -- and do not take the time 
to learn the historiography -- show actual open disdain for the 
historiography.  They appraoch history with the naivete of a college 
freshman; any resource is as good as any other.  All scholarship is a 
conversation, historiography very consciously so.  If you don't 
understand what the conversation is about, you'll take everything out of 
context and -- I have seen more than once -- there are economists in 
economic history who take these tidbits out of context and use them to 
buttress a theoretical model "proving" this or that narrow neoclassical 
hypothesis.  If you are going to redo John Commons and the Shoemakers, 
PLEASE do a good job.  READ first.  Thanks.   
 
(My ideal of economic history would be to know both the current 
historiography in that area, PLUS know the current economic literature 
in labor economics, and combine the two.  That is not real popular among 
economists in economic history.) 
 
Mary Schweitzer, Assoc. Prof., Dept. of History, Villanova University 
(on indefinite medical leave with CFIDS/M.E. since January 1995) 
mailto:[log in to unmask] 
http://www.delaware.infi.net/~msch/ 
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]