Try free for 30 days

Preview
  • Love and the Working Class

  • The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans
  • By: Karen Lystra
  • Narrated by: Lisa S. Ware
  • Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins

1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Access to thousands of additional audiobooks and Originals from the Plus Catalogue.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Love and the Working Class

By: Karen Lystra
Narrated by: Lisa S. Ware
Try Premium Plus free

$16.45 per month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $24.99

Buy Now for $24.99

Pay using voucher balance (if applicable) then card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions Of Use and Privacy Notice and authorise Audible to charge your designated credit card or another available credit card on file.

Publisher's Summary

Love and the Working Class is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. These laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay connected to those they loved. This book displays the personal expression of factory hands, manual laborers, peddlers, coopers, carpenters, lumbermen, miners, tanners, haulers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, domestics, sharecroppers, independent farmers, and common soldiers and their wives. Entering the "anonymous corners" of these people's lives through letters, we can see their humor, grit, hope, heartache, and endurance, and grasp what they believed and felt about themselves, their kinfolk, and their friends.

Using letters written to parents, siblings, husbands, wives, friends, and potential mates between 1830 and 1880, Karen Lystra identifies the shared conceptions of love and practices of courtship and marriage within a racially diverse population of free working-class people born in America. We can listen to their voices as they flirt, act as intermediaries in hometown courtships, express non-romantic love to their mates, and voice their hopes for the future. Through these letters, poor, minimally schooled Americans show us how they felt about love and how they created meaningful attachments in their uncertain lives.

©2024 Oxford University Press (P)2024 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

What listeners say about Love and the Working Class

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.