Burton J. Bledstein teaches Cultural, Intellectual, and Social History of the U.S. with a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among major awards, he has received four National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowships. A Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at U.C.L.A., and graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Professor Bledstein earned his Ph.D. in History at Princeton University. His first book was The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (W.W. Norton, 1976). Recently he published “Storytellers to the Middle Class” in a collection, Bledstein and Johnston ed., The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (Routledge 2001). He was Project Director of a university supported website, "In the Vicinity of the Maxwell Street Market” and is currently finishing a book, “Visual Thinking in Urban America: Jane Addams Encounters Lewis Hine's Hull-House Photography.” Other current projects based on comprehensive bodies of research include a book about Mark Twain and his generation of youth, “Poor, Pitiful Business: Growing Up Male in Mid-Nineteenth Century America”; a book about the young men and women who went to the California Gold Rush, “Prospecting in American Futures: ‘Seeing the Elephant' in California Gold”; and a book on the emergence and significance of reading and writing among ordinary people in the nineteenth century, “‘B(u)y the Book': Smart Knowledge for Common Folk.”

Bledstein traces the roots of professionalism to the early part of the nineteenth century when America was developing a unique class-system. During this time, nearly everyone thought of himself as being of the middle class. Rejecting such European distinctions as an aristocracy and a proletariat, America needed some other justification for the observable and necessary differences among people. Professionalism was, according to Bledstein, the ingenious and distinctly American solution to this problem since it provided a justification for status based on merit rather than wealth or property.

by Scott London

Ref:

http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/bledstein.html