This was one of the books that I had to read for my graduate class on Colorado history. I understand that the author was going for a different approach to the subject, but it felt that a lot of things were just thrown together and not organized very well. It was also hard to try and pull any points he was trying to make from the text. It was not written well and was very dry. I would not recommend this book to anyone and it was one of the worst nonfiction books I have ever read. Below is a detailed book analysis I had to do for my graduate history course at Adams State. It is much more detailed and does not really cover just how bad this book is. You can’t tell your professor that they picked a horrible book.
For the class that
this book was linked to (HIST 501 State History) first you picked your state
and then there was a list of books that you had to choose 3 from. I know…this
means that in a way I was responsible for my own pain with this book, but it
was still a recommendation from the professor. 2 stars out of 5 is the best I
can give this book and I only gave it that high of a score because you could
pull some data from it to use in other ways.
Class in our culture continues to be a major talking point, and its impacts on community have been well documented. Author Richard Hogan takes his turn to try and analyze these topics in the historical context of Colorado during its frontier days. In his preface he said that he wanted to approach this topic by looking at the economic and political institutions as they developed. When class is normally looked at it is from the approach of rich vs. poor and the effect that this relationship has on society. By looking at larger institutions, Hogan tried to add another perspective to the conversation. This is a complex topic and a person’s approach to can shape the outcome of their work.
Hogan broke his book into two main parts, with each focusing on different types of towns. First, carnival towns (Denver, Central City, and Greeley) were towns where the rights of individual labors were important, labor was organized, and their rights were protected by the local government. Then came caucus towns (Golden, Pueblo, and Canon City) which were towns where labor was economically dependent on the local industries, not organized, and property/private rights were protected by the local governments. Each town had its own chapter where he looked at things such as at whom crimes were directed, the type of professions that people worked, and local politics. Hogan makes sure to include cities from different areas of the state and includes the major industries that helped to shape each one. Greeley for example was not only farm/ranch focused, but started as a union company that was at least in part focused on a shared moral system and economic means of its members. He then ends his book with a discussion on what he presented means including how the interests of the different classes shaped both economic and political institutions. From the information that Hogan presented in the book he was able to develop some concepts/theories on how institutions impact class/community while supporting already established concepts. Not a new finding, but as something that reinforces previous perspectives was his mining example. In this example merchants and shopkeepers in Denver tried to control the price of gold which got miners in the mountains to join together and reestablish the price that worked in their favor. This could be seen as a form of unionization in which people with little power joined together in order to stop people in a higher class (with greater viewed power) from oppressing their economic means. In a way this muddies what class actually means in a community, because if ‘lessor’ classes are able to take power away from a higher one, then does class even matter in the larger community? Hogan best explains this when he says that “class is both an objective circumstance and a subjective experience”1.Another point he makes is that people don’t always join together, which he demonstrated in the discussion about caucus towns. In these towns, property rights were held as being more important than the rights of people/the individual. Hogan made sure that he stressed that because they didn’t organize in a political way, that it impacted any possible ability to set their own prices for their labor. By comparing these two different types of towns, he was able to show that people could influence their political/social (class/power) standing, but the power they received was influenced by the town they lived in. The political divisions could be seen even during the frontier days where the wealthy/trades workers supported the Republican Party while the miners and labors were pulled to the Democrat Party. The nation was watching Colorado during part of this time (1800s) to see which of the political parties would come out on top and it even impacted how long it took Colorado to become a state[i].
The topics Hogan covered in this book were not entirely new, but he was able to
expand on how these topics took shape in Colorado. In his research for the book
Hogan did use a mix of books, articles/journals, and newspapers. There was also
some town records used in his notes. In Hogan’s bibliographical sections he
starts out talking about archival sources, but they do not appear as much in
the notes section. This seemed a little odd since he had access to first person
accounts, but decided not to use this as his primary source of information. He
did use two newspapers, Rocky Mountain News and Western Mountaineer, for
primary source material for the time period. There were a few others mentioned,
but they were not used as much. Hogan used newspapers a lot when compared to
other source types, over 20% of the notes in some chapters. He didn’t have a
section on the historiography of his materials, but the articles and books were
written in different time periods up to the 1990s (when the book was
published).Even though Class & Community in Frontier Colorado was packed
with tons of information, charts, and pictures it is unclear what Hogan
actually contributed to the overall conversation about the state’s history. He
was trying to look at class and community at an institution level, but by doing
this it seems that a lot of the information was just thrown together with
points left unclear. An example of this is when he presents crime information.
He includes charts that show who the crimes were aimed at (persons, property,
or government) that made it to the different courts, but does explain how these
cases actually impacted class structure. The reader can relate these back to
the discussion about how the towns were broken down, but it just adds
information to support the towns being divided how they were. Hogan at one
point said that he picked each city to talk about, not because of how they were
similar to the other cities in their group, but how they were different. This
did show that even though some aspects made them similar to each other in the
carnival vs. caucus comparison, they were still shaped by their local peoples
and history. Also by looking at industries, the topic was much too large to
cover each one completely. It would have been better to pick towns that were
more similar to each other so that he would not have needed time to talk about
their differences and could have focused on making concise points. Hogan tried
to add to the conversation of class and community in Colorado by looking at the
influence of larger institutions. He broke the cities into carnival and caucus
towns to try and show how these governmental influences impacted the town. The
ideas he presented in the book were not new, but supported what others have
found in the relations between the different classes. Hogan used a large
diversity of research materials to create the book which made it packed with
information. The problem is that he did not present that information in a way
that made a clear point as to what the purpose of the book was about. Overall,
Class & Community in Frontier Colorado is a good book for basic information
on Colorado during the frontier times.
[i] Richard Hogan, Class & Community in Frontier Colorado (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1990), 209.
No comments:
Post a Comment