Reviews for The Intellectual Origins of Mass Parties and Mass Schools in the Jacksonian Era: Creating a Conformed Citizenry

The average rating for The Intellectual Origins of Mass Parties and Mass Schools in the Jacksonian Era: Creating a Conformed Citizenry based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-08-24 00:00:00 David Dobson Laboring at Play takes a fascinating and potentially fun topic, middle-class parlor games between 1850-1920, and with the help of theory and the language of theory turns out some muddled prose and veiled conclusions. I was interested in the book and its subject but by replacing narrative and any specific social or cultural history for a constant flow of theoretical jargon it became tiresome very quickly. I stopped when I reached this small mountain of vagueness: "Adding another layer of complication onto the binaries of individual and collective, mid-century home entertainments challenged the standardized body by producing twisted, distorted forms that challenged the conditions of controlled conformity, yet in doing so, offered a new tradition of bodily alignment. This was, then, the practice that harnessed vestiges of an individualism that was, in the end, more idealized than enacted." These kind of sentences are acceptable in small and measured doses, when they become the norm it is difficult to maintain attention.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-12 00:00:00 Aletta Steyn Four stars, though I admit being torn between three and four stars. Honestly, three and a half. I would happily say four if I hadn't gotten completely bogged down in the long middle section of the book giving the history of American whaling ports. The political background on the American whaling colonies didn't interest me nearly as much as the material on whaling itself - the lives and methods of the whalers, details of ships, whaling grounds, and so on. As a result, I put this book aside sometime last year and never managed to pick it up again until about a week ago, when I doggedly ploughed through the (to me) drier middle section into some (again, to me) livelier chapters (chapters 14-19, to be precise) which provided the information on whalers and whaling that I'd hoped to find. On the whole, I enjoyed the author's approach to the subject, which gave me enough information to understand unfamiliar material but wasn't overwhelming. As a bonus, I've read a fair number of books on overlapping and related events mentioned in this book, such as In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, and recently have been reading Patrick O'Brien's famed Aubrey/Maturin series along with a few other nonfiction nautical books, which largely account for my decision to pick this book up once again. To put it simply, I'm on a bit of a seafaring book binge. As another reviewer, Matt, has pointed out, this book tends to be anecdotal, and the quality of the anecdotes varies. While I am, on the whole, usually fond of such books, I do wish there had been some underlying theme to unify these anecdotes in a more cohesive way. However, having said that, I do have a much better picture of whaling as an industry and a better appreciation for its economic role, a surprisingly significant one, in our nation's history. I was surprised to learn, for example, that in 1846, 735 ships out of a worldwide total of 900 whaling ships were American, and that at the height of the "Golden Age" of whaling (1812 to the late 1850s), whaleships accounted for "roughly of the nation's registered merchant tonnage" and employed approximately 70,000 people. I have two of the author's other books, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America and When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail on my to-read list and am looking forward to reading them. All in all, these books by Eric Jay Dolin promise to be fine additions to my growing "commodity history" shelf.