In the opening pages of her clearly written and nuanced book on the emergence of the provincial middle classes, Catherine Kelly notes that nineteenth-century Americans held two seemingly different visions of the New England town. While some lauded the New England town as a source of order and stability, others condemned it as stagnant and parochial. What the casual observer misses, according to Kelly, is that these visions rested on a shared belief that the New England town had remained untouched by market culture, somehow avoiding the changes wrought by capitalism. Historians have devoted considerable attention to the processes that transformed rural New England in the nineteenth century, stressing the transformative effects of the “market revolution” on economic and social relations. Despite living in the midst of these enormous changes, Kelly's observers focused primarily on continuity—seeing in the New England town the persistence of preindustrial values of cleanliness, social harmony, and stability. Rather than dismissing these visions as mere “pastoral fantasy,” Kelly interprets them as expressions of profound anxiety, generated by an emerging provincial middle class in the throes of negotiating the transition from a household economy to a commercialized one. Ultimately, however, their expressions of resistance would prove pivotal in the spread of bourgeois culture and in the perpetuation of capitalist social relations.

In 1995, with the assistance of a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities, a number of scholars gathered at the University of Pennsylvania to commemorate the centenary of W. E. B. Du Bois's study The Philadelphia Negro (New York, 1967 [1899]). This collection of essays is the result of that conference; it attempts to situate Du Bois's project within the social and intellectual contexts of the late nineteenth century and to examine how it may help us understand contemporary intersections of race and the city.

It is fitting that this volume of fourteen essays is dedicated to Allan Wildman and edited by Reginald Zelnik, two historians whose seminal books a generation ago helped to define the parameters within which all future explorations of the complex relationship between Russian workers and their would-be labor organizers and political leaders would take place. This collection of essays stems from a conference held in St. Petersburg in 1995, the full proceedings of which were published two years later in a Russian-language edition. Now an English-language audience can sample articles written by the American, British, French, German, and Russian participants.