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This chapter analyzes the social institutions that create an indebted world. It argues that credit and debt have become important, if rarely analyzed, covariates of social stratification. The chapter is organized as follows. It begins by discussing stratification in more detail. Then it turns to the conventional measurement of social class, and discusses how debt and credit might blur or disrupt conventional understanding of social class. Finally, it discusses the potential ramifications of blurry class boundaries for American society and for sociology.

Locating women’s musical practices in the performance of gentility provides one path forward in reconciling archival evidence (binder’s volumes and other aspects of material culture that are often labeled ephemera) with existing music histories because gentility, unlike social status, belonged to no single group of people. Gentility crossed class boundaries and allowed black and white women to define or redefine their status during a time of great social change. The Introduction clarifies the use of the term gentility in this book and contextualizes its role in the performance of culture by amateur musicians in the parlor.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of domestic work. The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines domestic work to include housework; caring for children, ill, disabled, or elderly people in private homes; and tasks such as “driving the family car, taking care of the garden, and guarding private houses.” Paid domestic work is an ancient occupation, rooted in feudal economic systems, but it is part of the modern world under capitalism. Historically, domestic workers cooked, cleaned, and cared for children, as they do today. However, this work has shifted from in-kind payment (room and board) to wages, and from most domestic workers living with employers to most living separately. Also, middle- and upper-class women have entered the workforce, relying on domestic workers to take up the slack at home. Based on research conducted between 2010 and 2018, this book explains why domestic work remains an occupation of last resort in Ecuador (and elsewhere) and discusses how these working conditions might be improved. In exploring the experiences of paid domestic workers in Ecuador, it shows how concepts of social reproduction, urban informal employment, and class boundaries can help illuminate the particular forms of exploitation in this work and explain why domestic work continues to be a bad job.

This chapter explores the tendency of disciplinary divisions to narrow the views and importance of figures while using Nomura Bōtō as a reference. It mentions how Bōtō's life is illustrative of Bakumatsu's society and culture. The Bakumatsu period saw the weakening of the waka establishment in line with the decentralization of literary activity. Moreover, the Bakumatsu period witnessed the breakdown of class boundaries and gender roles in society. The chapter also addresses the chiliastic atmosphere being solved through class fluidity and the millenarian worldview. It uses the life of Shibue Io as an example of the aforementioned changes. The chapter then explains how liminality could help understand Bōtō's mature vision.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book examines the imaginative representation of venereal disease in British literature and art produced between 1660 and 1800. In other words, it considers not how venereal disease was diagnosed, treated, or experienced in the eighteenth century, but rather how it was depicted by some of the many poets, novelists, dramatists, and artists who sought to exploit its flexibility as a metaphor. The chapters that follow track the representation of venereal disease in a wide range of eighteenth-century images and texts. In the process, it suggests that this “loathsome disease” became an important vehicle for considering—or reconsidering— some of the most important social and economic phenomena of the age: commercialization, globalization, changing gender norms, shifting class boundaries.

Chapter eight presents a case study of music in daily life based on the manuscript autobiography of Johann Christian Müller from Stralsund. Müller grew up playing the keyboard recreationally and it became a focal point of his social life while he was studying at the university in Jena. He used his abilities at the keyboard to cultivate and maintain relationships with his friends, landlords, patrons, and other acquaintances. Music making also featured prominently in his later years as a house tutor in Eixen, where he cultivated an intimate relationship with Lotchen von Lillieström, one of the daughters of the aristocratic family he served. The keyboard lessons he offered became the primary basis for their spending time together and led to considerable controversy within the household and beyond.