================= 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]