Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America’s transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, <I>Capitalism Takes Command</I> presents a history of family farming,...</i>

<DIV><I>Ready-Made Democracy</I> explores the history of men's dress in America to consider how capitalism and democracy emerged at the center of American life during the century between the Revolution and the Civil War. Michael Zakim demonstrates how clothing initially attained a significant place in the...</i></div>

In a capitalist epoch of separation, disintegration, analysis, and individualizing the social order had to be reconstituted. That order needed to base itself on the same fluid, individualistic values that drove the market. This essay argues that a group of new nervous disorders in the nineteenth...

Introduction: an American revolutionary tradition / Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith -- The agrarian context of American capitalist development / Christopher Clark -- The mortgage worked the hardest: the fate of landed independence in nineteenth-century America / Jonathan Levy -- Toxic debt,...