Study Questions: Dawley: Class and Community, chapters 1-4
1. What was the nature of production in pre-industrial Lynn? Consider the organization of the ten-footer and the relationship between family, economy, and politics. Would you characterize the economy in Lynn as a moral economy (notions of competency, justi prices or just wages) or a market economy?
2. What was the masters' ideology? What did they consider the proper role of labor? or capital?; the relation between the two? Compare the masters in Lynn to those in Philadelphia?
3. How did the productive process change during the first decades of the nineteenth century? What was the role of the storekeepers? How did changes in production affect the place of the master and his journeymen? Of women and children?
4. What was the difference between a manufacturer (employer) and a master? An employer and a wage workers? How did the town of Lynn change when the relationship between employer and wage work replaced the relationship between master and journeyman? Consider the diverse patterns of social relations of these tandems.
5. What is the significance of The Society for the Promotion of Industry, Frugality, and Temperance for manufacturers (employers) and wage workers?
6. What was the significance of Equal Rights for manufacturers and for workers?
7. How did changes in the production of shoes affect relations between men and women, parents and children in Lynn?
8. What was the relationship between chattel slavery and wage slavery? the Great Strike and the coming of the Civil War?
9. What was the significance of the Tree of Liberty? Was the ballot box the coffin of class consciousness in Lynn?
10. When did the factory come to Lynn? What was the relationship of the factory to the process of industrialization?
11. How did the city of Lynn change during the nineteenth century? What was the relationship of urbanization to the process of industrialization?
12. How did the development of Lynn affect farmers in the surrounding countryside? Who were the outworkers?