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Benjamin Franklin's autobiography reveals his deep investment in shaping and controlling how both his contemporaries and posterity assessed his life and achievements. This essay explores Franklin's construction and presentation of his pride in his working-class origins and identity, analysing how and why Franklin sought not to hide his poor origins but rather to celebrate them as a virtue. As an extremely successful printer, Franklin had risen from working-class obscurity to the highest ranks of Philadelphia society, yet unlike other self-made men of the era Franklin embraced and celebrated his artisanal roots, and he made deliberate use of his working-class identity during the Seven Years War and the subsequent imperial crisis, thereby consolidating his own reputation and firming up the support of urban workers who considered him one of their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, I analyze First of May commemorations in the city of Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. I consider them as propitious moments in the development of working class identity in which the proletariat, taking to the streets, proudly displayed its symbols and the strength of its cohesion before other sectors of society. I also consider them as moments in which the significance of the date was disputed and through which it is possible to observe both the influence of different ideas circulating at the time and of contradictions within the international labor movement at the crossroads of the 19th and 20th centuries. [TRANSLATION]

The question whether socioeconomic status gradients in adult mortality have changed over a broad historical period has become an important political and theoretical issue but is hard to test. In this article we study long-term trends in social inequality in adult mortality by using data for 2 (of the 11) provinces of the Netherlands for the period 1812-1922. We apply indirect estimation techniques, which have been developed for the analysis of mortality patterns in countries with deficient data. Our article shows that indeed there was a clear social class gradient in mortality, with the elite having higher survival chances between ages 35 and 55 than the middle class and farmers. Differences were even more apparent in comparison with workers. Over time there was a strong convergence among social classes in mortality levels. The implications of our results for the dominant views on the change in living standards in the past are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a model for analyzing social identity and applies it to the political economy of income redistribution, focusing on class and national identities. The model attempts to distill major findings in social psychology into a parsimonious statement of what it means to identify with a group and what factors determine the groups with whom people identify. It then proposes an equilibrium concept where both identities and behavior are endogenously determined. Applying this model to redistribution helps explain three empirical patterns in modern democracies. First, national identification is more common among the poor than among the rich. Second, national identification tends to reduce support for redistribution. Third, across democracies there is a strong negative relationship between the prevalence of national identification and the level of redistribution. The model further points to national eminence, national threats, and diversity within the lower class as factors that can reduce redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes two public dining halls in Mexico City in the 1940s and 1950s and examines how the middle-class reformers and working-class comensales negotiated modernity and how food practices transformed class identity and gender in the city. Public dining halls were established by the Ministry of Public Health and Assistance as a way to transform the eating habits of the working class. There were strategies to attract diners, such as radio spots, fliers, door to door invitations and the support of the Catholic Church. Rules enforced by state employees and social workers had to be followed. Manners, such as using cutlery instead of using tortillas to scoop up food and eating international cuisine, had to be learned by the diners.

This article calls into question the common claim that class identity does not matter for American political behavior. Using panel-study data spanning thirty-two years and two generations, we investigate the effects of social-class identity on five participatory orientations towards government. As expected, working-class identifiers in both generations consistently display lower levels of involvement in politics than do middle-class identifiers. Significantly, however, these differences typically persist when the analysis controls for objective indicators of class and are always enhanced among those who retain the same class identity over time. Rather than sustaining a conclusion that class identification has little relevance for Americans, the results suggest that class may be particularly important in the present political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]