As an analytical tool and historiographical category, class has an important place in American cultural studies, if only because so many have thought it irrelevant to the study of the United States. Unlike Europe's old countries, with their feudal pasts and monarchical legacies, the United States, it has often been said, is a land of unlimited economic and geographical mobility. Abraham Lincoln was only one of the most notable believers in "American exceptionalism," the idea that the United States, uniquely among the globe's nations, assigned its citizens no fixed class definition and afforded boundless opportunity to those who would only work hard and look beyond the next horizon. The reality is much more complicated, as scholars and critics have to some extent always known, and over the last forty years have demonstrated in studies of U.S. class formation, cultural allegiance, and artistic expression.

Some form of class consciousness has existed in North America at least since white settlers arrived; John Winthrop's well-known sermon aboard the Arbella in 1630,"A Model of Christian Charity,"in part justifies the existence of class differences by making them crucial to God's plan of binding through charity the socially stratified community of Puritan believers. The descendants of those believers would become an ever-rising post-Puritan middle class, as German sociologist Max Weber (1905) famously suggested when he linked the "Protestant ethic"with capitalist economic energies. Simultaneously, the development of a specifically working-class or "plebeian"consciousness would come out of the early U.S. situation of class stratification, and the scholarly dilemma ever since has been how to account for such stratification historically, socially, and culturally.

Closely related to such categories as "station," "status," "group," and "kind,"class resonates with implications of value, quality, respectability, and religious virtue. Goodness is gilded in much U.S. cultural thought, and it has been difficult to pry capital loose from rectitude. A related difficulty is that class can seem a natural and fixed category; certainly one strain of social and historical analysis in American studies has been marked by a static account of class and class belonging, with discrete strata exhibiting characteristic habits and allegiances and existing in hierarchical formation. In one of the best theoretical accounts, Erik Olin Wright (1985) makes useful distinctions among class structure, class formation, and class consciousness. Class structure is that ensemble of social relations into which individuals enter and which shapes their class consciousness; class formations are those organized collectivities that come about as a result of the interests shaped by the class structure or system. As Wright sums it up, classes "have a structural existence which is irreducible to the kinds of collective organizations which develop historically (class formations), the class ideologies held by individuals and organizations (class consciousness) or the forms of conflict engaged in by individuals as class members or by class organizations (class struggle), and . . . such class structures impose basic constraints on these other elements in the concept of class" (28).

These distinctions help keep in view the fact that class and classification are dynamic processes, more the result than the cause of historical events. Class, as British historian and cultural studies scholar E. P. Thompson (1963) insisted, is a relational category, always defined against and in tension with its dialectical others. In response to British cultural theorist Raymond Williams's (1958) claim that culture should be defined as a "whole way of life," Thompson (1961a, 1961b) redefined culture as a "whole way of conflict," structured in dominance and constantly contested by its various social actors. Work on class in American studies has done much to substantiate Thompson's thesis, and the connections between Thompson's historical reconstruction of British working-class formation, Williams's influential model of cultural studies, and American cultural studies scholarship focused on class have been often intimate.

This emphasis has battered time-honored and influential ideas about U.S. culture and society, such as Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis"(1893), in which westward-roving U.S. Americans continually reestablish the conditions for social mobility and rising wages, or Louis Hartz's lament that a hegemonic "liberal tradition" rendered U.S. Americans incapable of thinking outside the contours of social consensus (1955). American studies scholars have shown, for example, how self-conscious, articulate, and combative early working-class or "artisan republican" ideologies were in waging rhetorical—and sometimes actual—war on what they termed the "non-producing classes" or "the upper ten." Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984) is one of the finest studies of the former, while Stuart Blumin's The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (1989) is one of the best on the latter. Both capture how extensively the cultural and affective life of social class shaped democracy in the United States.

Each of these studies exemplifies a body of historiography that first emerged in the 1960s to explain the shape and nature of various class formations. Wilentz is the beneficiary of the "new social history," of which Herbert Gutman (1976) was perhaps the chief U.S. representative. Subsequent studies of the labor process, shop-floor cultures, workers' leisure activities, and other matters have decisively demonstrated the tenacious, conflictual character of working-class belonging—even, or most particularly, when that belonging is overdetermined by being African American or female (Peiss 1986; Kelley 1994). Meanwhile, extensive studies of bourgeois or middle-class cultural formations in major books by Warren Susman (1984), Jackson Lears (1981), and many others have shown how ruling-class desires and cultural investments have influenced everything from modern art to modern therapy, as well as the degree to which such canonical ideas as the "American character," "American progress," and the "American Dream" are inflected by class. Perhaps most illuminating have been studies by such scholars as Christine Stansell (1986), Richard Slotkin (1985), Hazel Carby (1987), Alan Trachtenberg (1982), and Lizabeth Cohen (2003) that examine the complex interrelations among various class fractions and formations.

One of the common findings of the latter sort of study is how often cross-class interaction works not to dissolve class boundaries but to buttress them—in, for instance, middle-class philanthropic enterprises that wind up solidifying bourgeois formations and alienating their would-be working-class wards, or African American strategies of racial uplift that too often demonize the black working class. For this reason and others, the category of class has been immensely useful in American cultural studies as an analytical tool capable of unpacking the sometimes surprising dynamics of cultural and textual processes and products, from social clubs and theatrical performances to dime novels and Disney films. The class segregation of midnineteenth-century U.S. theaters, for example, has earned a whole tradition of scholarship, with its attention to class-bound characters, plots, settings, and themes; much the same has been done for the history of U.S. fiction, which has, scholars argue, differing trajectories based not only on plot, character, and outcome but also on mode of production and distribution. Cultural forms hardly recognized at all under erstwhile rubrics of U.S. cultural expression—balladry, mob action, table manners, amusement parks—have found a place in scholarly debates precisely as classed forms of cultural life. The saloon is now recognized no less than the literary salon as a space of cultural and social self-organization.

Just as importantly, quintessential public artifacts of U.S. culture such as New York City's Central Park need to be understood as complex mediations of conflicting class, party, and historical factors. Witness too studies of U.S. newspapers, in which various class accents have been seen to vie for control of a given editorial tendency, newsworthy event, or style of audience address. The key, and often exhilarating, emphasis in such studies is that U.S. cultural forms do not so much belong to a given class or class fraction as they become sites in which class struggles are fought out. In recent years, studies of American "hemispheric" and even global class struggles have moved to the fore, whether focused on the emergence of internationalist social movements (Reed 2005), the character and function of manufacturing sweatshops (Ross 1997), or the place of U.S. cultural formations in the world system (Denning 2004).

At their best, class-sensitive versions of American cultural studies are animated by the attempt to grasp the complex dialectic of work and leisure—the structuring of U.S. society by the unequal and uneven social relations of labor and the ways in which those relations give rise to a vast array of cultural forms. The social location of the artist, the assembly-line production of films and cheap fiction: whatever the case, class analysis has immeasurably benefited our understanding of the cultural scene. The United States may be an exceptional place—what country isn't?—but it has seen its fair share of class conflict in the sphere of culture, conflict that is intense, productive, and ongoing.

Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 49-52