Brian Luskey

Teaching Fields:

Social and Cultural History of the United States, Revolution to Reconstruction

Contact:

Brian Luskey
202J Woodburn Hall
P.O. Box 6303
Morgantown, WV 26506-6303
Phone: (304) 293-2421 ext. 5236
Fax: (304) 293-3616
Brian.Luskey@mail.wvu.edu

• Degrees

  Ph.D. Emory University, 2004
  M.A. Emory University, 2000
  A.B., Davidson College, 1997

• Research Interests

  In my book, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America, I examine the lives of clerks—the copyists, bookkeepers, and salesmen who were crucial participants in the commercializing and industrializing economy of mid-nineteenth-century American cities. I explore their role in perpetuating and rethinking cultural narratives about economic opportunity, social order, and self-making that helped Americans make sense of the dislocating changes happening in their midst. These social and economic changes expanded clerks’ work portfolio and opened a wider array of leisure options to them in both refined and disreputable places. Clerks’ experiences permit an investigation of the contradictions at the heart of the bourgeois quest for power and prestige in America. Young, native-born, white, Protestant men—strivers who seemed to be best placed to achieve economic success, social mobility, and cultural respectability—found these goals elusive. They came into conflict with their contemporaries about the meanings of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age in a society that was at once fluid and relentlessly stratified. Newspaper editors, ministers, and other commentators criticized clerks for seducing female consumers into buying goods and participating in New York’s underworld “sporting culture” populated by rakes who praised the sexual conquests of rogues. As women began to take clerkships in increasing numbers during the Civil War era, male clerks redefined the meaning of success by trying to obtain managerial positions, exhibiting the ways in which Americans debated the meanings of freedom and work during the age of emancipation.

  I am interested in the cultural history of nineteenth-century capitalism and hope to illustrate in my work the ways in which ordinary people shaped markets and the meanings of economic exchange. My future research will examine the transactions taking place in “intelligence offices,” “mock” auction houses, and a variety of “underground” economies to illuminate the less understood corners of market activity in antebellum America and the values that informed buyers’ and sellers’ economic endeavors.

• Grad Students Advised

• Courses Offered

  HIST 152: Survey of American History to 1865
  HIST 393: The Civil War on Film
  HIST 454: Antebellum America, 1800-1860
  HIST 484: Popular Culture in P. T. Barnum’s America
  HIST 493: The Problem of Class in Early America
  HIST 493: American Cultural History, 1776-1893
  HIST 757: Graduate Readings in U. S. History, 1787-1850
  HIST 758: Graduate Seminar in U. S. History, 1787-1850

• Publications

  On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (New York University Press, 2010).

  “Warranted Speculations,” review of Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse, in Reviews in American History 36 (September 2008): 357-364.

  “Jumping Counters in White Collars: Manliness, Respectability, and Work in the Antebellum City,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (Summer 2006): 173-219.

  ”’What Is My Prospects?’: The Contours of Mercantile Apprenticeship, Ambition, and Advancement in the Early American Economy,” Business History Review 78 (Winter 2004): 665-702.

  “Riot and Respectability: The Shifting Terrain of Class Language and Status in Baltimore during the Great Strike of 1877,” American Nineteenth Century History 4 (Fall 2003): 61-96.