[125 years ago this week, the United States Steel Corporation was created. That was and remains one of the most striking moments of incorporation in American history, but it’s far from alone, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of moments and contexts for that subject. Leading up to a special weekend post on our own, particularly fraught moment!]
On my own connections to a foundational AmericanStudies text, and two distinct takeaways for all of us.
My dissertation advisor and good friend Miles Orvell (who studied with Trachtenberg and then worked alongside him on multiple projects) would be very disappointed that I haven’t written at length before today (at least not on the blog) about Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (1982). And Orvell would be right to chastise me, because there were and remain few scholarly works that have made more of an impact on this young AmericanStudier—first when I read Trachtenberg’s book as part of my first-year History & Literature Tutorial in college, where it modeled an AmericanStudies approach as well as any text I had ever encountered and really helped push me to define my own work through that lens, then and ever since; and then especially when I returned to the book during my research for my dissertation and eventual first book on America in the Gilded Age. It’s just a hugely important touchstone for this AmericanStudier, and I’m glad to have the chance to feature it more fully in this space today.
As with any scholarly book published more than four decades ago, there are of course aspects of Trachtenberg’s work that have been challenged since, and certainly layers of Gilded Age America that scholars would focus on much more fully in such a project today. But there likewise remain key takeaways from which we still have a lot to learn in 2026, and here I’ll focus on two related to this week’s blog series. Without question the most groundbreaking idea in Trachtenberg’s book was that the development of countless corporations in late 19th and early 20th century America (including the origin point for this series, U.S. Steel) wasn’t simply an industrial or economic, nor even just a social, phenomenon—that it paralleled, echoed, and amplified trends of incorporation on every level of American society, culture, and identity. My own first book builds on that concept to make the case that national narratives of history were likewise incorporated in this period, and one of my main arguments there and in work ever since—that those unifying visions of history required the exclusion or at least minimizing of many other voices and narratives—was likewise influenced by Trachtenberg’s thesis about the exclusionary effects of the incorporations he analyzes.
If we go beyond the Gilded Age, I believe there’s a second, more implicit but also even more significant (and, I’m aware, controversial), takeaway from such ideas in Trachtenberg’s book (and my own, among many other parallel scholarly projects of course). The association of corporations with exclusion isn’t just a coincidence nor simply a reflection of their structure or form—to my mind, at least in American history, corporations have consistently allied themselves with conservatism (duh, I know) and white supremacy (the more controversial part of my take here). Of course there are exceptions, corporations that have helped fight for progressive causes, that have championed diversity and inclusion, that can be seen as exemplifying the best of both corporate America and American ideals. But even then, when the wind seems to be blowing in a different direction, such corporations can likewise reveal more exclusionary tendencies, as we’ve seen this year with Target for example (about which I’ll have more to say in my weekend post). One more reason to fight against the incorporation of America, or at the very least for the inclusion of alternatives to that trend.
Next incorporation context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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