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Class and Community in Frontier Colorado
Spurred by the Gold Rush of 1859, settlers of diverse backgrounds and nationalities trekked to Colorado and began building towns. Existing accounts of their struggles and those of townbuilders throughout the American West focus on boom-or-bust economics, rampant boosterism, and bitter social conflicts. This, according to sociologist Richard Hogan, is not the whole story.
In Class and Community in Frontier Colorado Hogan offers a fresh perspective on the frontier townbuilding experience. He argues that townbuilding in Colorado was not, as some have suggested, monopolized by local boosters or national business interests. It was, instead, a complex, dynamic process that reflected competition, cooperation, and conflict among various socioeconomic classes, and between local and national business interests as well.
Hogan shows how farmers, ranchers, miners, tradesmen, merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, land speculators, and eastern investors all vied for control in six of Colorado’s emerging urban centers: Denver, Central City, Greeley, Golden, Pueblo, and Canon City. Meticulously he traces the conflicts and coalitions that arose in and among these groups.
By combining historical sociology with local history, Hogan’s study challenges current thinking about economic development, class structure and conflict, political partisanship, collective action, and social change in the American West.
In Class and Community in Frontier Colorado Hogan offers a fresh perspective on the frontier townbuilding experience. He argues that townbuilding in Colorado was not, as some have suggested, monopolized by local boosters or national business interests. It was, instead, a complex, dynamic process that reflected competition, cooperation, and conflict among various socioeconomic classes, and between local and national business interests as well.
Hogan shows how farmers, ranchers, miners, tradesmen, merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, land speculators, and eastern investors all vied for control in six of Colorado’s emerging urban centers: Denver, Central City, Greeley, Golden, Pueblo, and Canon City. Meticulously he traces the conflicts and coalitions that arose in and among these groups.
By combining historical sociology with local history, Hogan’s study challenges current thinking about economic development, class structure and conflict, political partisanship, collective action, and social change in the American West.
250 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 1990
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October 4, 2021Aside from the middle initial (which is wrong). Your presentation of my book is fair. This book began as a dissertation, completed in 1982, which was a typical empirical social science history project. The eight years of revision produced a reasonably good first book, which is still worth reading.
Historians tend not to like this book, although Carl Abbott was won over. Others tend to prefer my second book, The Failure of Planning: Permitting Sprawl in San Diego Suburbs, 1970-1999 (OSU Press, 2003).
Both are still worth reading, but my more recent efforts to publish a book on Reconstruction and Redemption in Georgia, 1868-1880, should produce the best of my limited series of sociological dissertations upon historical epochs.
This 1990 book was one of the last of the old social science history books--using social science theory and methods to analyze archival data--turning words into numbers. As such, it is a dinosaur. The last structural, modernist, Marxist analysis.
Admittedly, it is not as well written as this review. Also, it seems old fashioned (having been preempted by the New Western History of the nineties). Perhaps, aside from the theory and the data (and the methodology), this might be considered a paradigm that never was.
The dialectical theory of class structure and class conflict, evidenced in the experience of qualitatively different Colorado frontier towns might still prove useful. Class conflict--the engine of history, at the close of the frontier experience takes distinctive forms (intra and inter-class conflict) because of differences in frontier political and economic institutions. Miners and other classes that established economic independence and political autonomy engaged in garden variety (inter) class conflicts. Cowboys and farmers were less heroic proletarians or were bourgeois or petit bourgeois reformists.
At some point, I may work up an analysis of Populism in Colorado and Georgia--to illustrate the medium-run effects.
That should be more than enough for now.
Historians tend not to like this book, although Carl Abbott was won over. Others tend to prefer my second book, The Failure of Planning: Permitting Sprawl in San Diego Suburbs, 1970-1999 (OSU Press, 2003).
Both are still worth reading, but my more recent efforts to publish a book on Reconstruction and Redemption in Georgia, 1868-1880, should produce the best of my limited series of sociological dissertations upon historical epochs.
This 1990 book was one of the last of the old social science history books--using social science theory and methods to analyze archival data--turning words into numbers. As such, it is a dinosaur. The last structural, modernist, Marxist analysis.
Admittedly, it is not as well written as this review. Also, it seems old fashioned (having been preempted by the New Western History of the nineties). Perhaps, aside from the theory and the data (and the methodology), this might be considered a paradigm that never was.
The dialectical theory of class structure and class conflict, evidenced in the experience of qualitatively different Colorado frontier towns might still prove useful. Class conflict--the engine of history, at the close of the frontier experience takes distinctive forms (intra and inter-class conflict) because of differences in frontier political and economic institutions. Miners and other classes that established economic independence and political autonomy engaged in garden variety (inter) class conflicts. Cowboys and farmers were less heroic proletarians or were bourgeois or petit bourgeois reformists.
At some point, I may work up an analysis of Populism in Colorado and Georgia--to illustrate the medium-run effects.
That should be more than enough for now.
March 9, 2020
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.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews