Social Change in America ─ From the Revolution Through the Civil War

The processes of social change in the late colonial period and early years of the new Republic made a dramatic imprint on the character of American society. These changes over a century or more were rooted in the origins of the United States, its rapid expansion of people and territory, its patterns of economic change and development, and the conflicts that led to its cataclysmic division and reunification through the Civil War. Christopher Clark's brilliant account of these changes in the social relationships of Americans breaks new ground in its emphasis on the crucial importance of free and unfree labor, regional characteristics, and the sustained tension between arguments for geographic expansion versus economic development.

Christopher Clark is professor of history at the University of Connecticut and author of The Communitarian Movement and The Roots of Rural Capitalism. Born in England, he studied at the University of Warwick and did his graduate work at Harvard University. He has received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Storrs, Connecticut.