Sean Wilentz. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the Working Class, 1788-1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 2004.
The American Republic of 1788 was not, in Wilentz's telling, a class-conscious society. The "Artisan Republic" which had taken form by the rise of Jeffersonian Republicanism was predicated on a unity of purpose and interest among a stable, self-regulating artisan class in which there was a harmony of interest between apprentice, journeyman, and master. By the end of the Civil War, the United States had a large, growing, and self-aware working class with decades of activism, cultural and social development, and independent institutional history to draw on. The complicated road from the "Artisan Republic" to working class consciousness played out across the country, but Wilentz argues that in the metropolitan venue of New York City, it did so in particularly acute and influential ways.
This is a roughly chronological account, focused on class formation and working class politics--politics being defined in the broadest sense. It is also over three decades old and certainly there is subsequent research which would complicate the narrative, but it is also a richly detailed and heavily sourced study of its kind. The core of this sprawling saga is the complicated ways in which republican language was used, referred to, and re-imagined to interpret and defend changes and innovations in nascent working-class organization and self-conception. Language of mutuality and republican disinterest was held onto and stretched to--and past--the breaking point. It was a long, convoluted struggle to get from one end of this conceptual journey to the other, and for much longer than might seem reasonable both workers and "capitalists" maintained fidelity to the notion of artisan republicanism. Capitalism, entrepreneurial innovation, and the rise of wage labor at the expense of the apprentice/master relationship eroded the foundations of those older notions, but the language and conceptual frames lingered.
