The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century City
Michael B. KatzKatz makes it clear that his book is a “mixture of hard data and rash speculation,” but he has, in fact, amassed extraordinarily complete data which he uses to make a series of important statements about the people who lived in Hamilton, the structure of their inequality, their social and physical mobility, their growing up and growing rich, or not. He blends history, sociology, and psychology in a unique fashion when he describes growing up in the nineteenth century, either as a member of the entrepreneurial class in a small but thriving commercial city, or as one less favored.
This book will profoundly affect the future direction of social history because of its focus, its methods, and its style, and because the author asks a series of extraordinarily provocative questions. What connections, for example, can we assume between the structure of the family and attitudes and emotions of the people within it? Can we assume that growing up within a nineteenth-century extended family produced a different set of attitudes or a different personality in a child than life within a nuclear family? What inference can we draw from the stability of the distribution of wealth across time?