0226977935. This book is in good condition; no remainder marks. Dustjacket

0226977935. This book is in good condition; no remainder marks. Dustjacket does have some shelfwear. Inside pages are clean except for some highlights in the first 10 pages.; 306 pages.

x, 296, [6] pages. Illustrations. Includes Acknowledgments, Introduction:

x, 296, [6] pages. Illustrations. Includes Acknowledgments, Introduction: Sartorial Politics, Conclusion, Notes, and Index. Chapters include A Homespun Ideology, A Clothing Business, The Reinvention of Tailoring, Dressing for Work, Ready-Made Labor, The Seamstress, A Fashion Regime, Conclusion, Notes, and Index. Publisher's ephemera laid in. The author traces the evolution of homespun clothing into its ostensible opposite--the woolen coats, vests, and pantaloons that were "ready-made" for sale and wear across the country. He demonstrates how traditional notions of work and property actually helped give birth to the modern industrial order. Michael Zakim is a member of the history faculty at Tel Aviv University in Israel, specializing in American social and cultural history. His scholarship, informed by cultural, social, political, and business history, tells the story of the modern economy and its rise to sovereign status. He explains how buying and selling became a dominant form of social intercourse and an equally dominant form of social thought. He is the author of Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 and "Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made", which describes the creation of a market society in nineteenth-century America. Both studies explore the conditions for capital's transformation into capitalism, which brought about a revolution in government, family, work, and the self. He is the editor of two special issues of the Israeli historical quarterly, Zmanim, devoted, respectively, to the history of the body and the history of privacy. Ready-Made Democracy explores the history of men's dress in America to consider how capitalism and democracy emerged at the center of social life during the century between the Revolution and the Civil War. The story begins with the elevation of homespun clothing to a political ideology on the eve of Independence. Homespun clothing tied the productive efforts of the household to those of the nation, becoming a most tangible expression of the citizen's attachment to the public's happiness. Coarse dress did not long remain in the wardrobe, particularly not among those political classes who talked most about it. Nevertheless, exhortations of industry and simplicity became a fixture of American discourse over the following century of industrial revolution, as the mass-produced suit emerged as a badge of a uniquely virtuous American polity. It is here, Zakim argues, in the evolution of homespun into its ready-made opposite, that men's dress proves to be both material and metaphor for the rise of democratic capitalism-and a site of the new social arrangements of bourgeois life. In thus illuminating the critical links among culture, ideology, political economy, and fashion in antebellum America, Ready-Made Democracy will be essential to anyone interested in the history of the United States and the construction of modern life.